Artist Statement from the MFA Exhibition "Objects from a Future Past" as shown at the Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

Photographs from the MFA Exhibition "Draw Me Near" as shown at the Cora Stafford Gallery.

Artist Statement for the MFA Exhibition "Observing the Absurd" as shown at the Cora Stafford Gallery in Denton, Texas.

Understanding trends is helpful to identify future behaviors in the field, and the roles of people, places, and institutions in setting those trends. Although traditional clustering strategies can group articles into topics, these techniques do not focus on topics over limited timescales; additionally, even when articles are grouped, the generated results are extensive and difficult to navigate. To address these concerns, we create an interactive dashboard that helps an expert in the field to better understand and quantify trends in their area of research. Trend detection is performed using the time-biased document clustering introduced in Behpour et al. (2021) study. The developed and freely available web application enables users to detect well defined trending topics in financial journals by experimenting with various levels of temporal bias - from detecting short-timescale trends to allowing those trends to spread over longer times. Experts can readily drill down into the identified topics to understand their meaning through keywords, example articles, and time range. Overall, the interactive dashboard will allow experts in the field to sift through the vast literature to identify the concepts, people, places, and institutions most critical to the field.

This workshop is presented by members of a University of North Texas research team. First, the team will overview their experience as members of the research team and share experience in areas such as trust formation, team roles, productivity, work-life balance, faculty-students interaction, peer and faculty mentorship, dissertation preparation, and job seeking. Second, the workshop will discuss and brainstorm how this format can be implemented for organizations both with faculty-student teams and with peer-directed teams. Finally, successes and challenges are openly discussed with audience.

Global warming is the term used to describe critical environmental issues and concerns. Social media such as Twitter provides a platform for people to share information, exchange ideas, and express their opinions about current and timely issues. This study utilized contextual analysis to analyze data collected from Twitter for the hashtag "global warming" during the period 2010 & 2011. Using sentiment analysis and topic modeling, the study aimed first at assessing people's perception towards global warming issues, and second study the impact of misinformation from the standpoint of social noise on people's perception of global warming during critical environmental events. The outcome of this study helps create a better understanding of the environmental issues discussed on social media. The sentiment analysis from the data analyzed so far shows that most of the tweets were based on Twitter users' personal opinions and not science. The topic modeling results suggest that Twitter users typically tweeted when a major environmental event occurred due to global warming. Topic modeling also aids in the identification of terms that is associated with social noise. The presence of social noise suggests that misinformation does exist and spreads faster.

Building predictive models for companies often relies on inference using historical data of companies in the same industry sector. However, companies are similar across a variety of dimensions that should be leveraged in relevant prediction problems. This is particularly true for large, complex organizations which may not be well defined by a single industry and have no clear peers. To enable prediction using company information across a variety of dimensions, we create an embedding of company stocks, Stock2Vec, which can be easily added to any prediction model that applies to companies with associated stock prices. We describe the process of creating this rich vector representation from stock price fluctuations and characterize what the dimensions represent. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate this embedding in applied machine learning problems in various business contexts. Our experiment results demonstrate that the four features in the Stock2Vec embedding can readily augment existing cross-company models and enhance cross-company predictions.

This article looks at different eras where African American voices and bodies were uplifted through the arts, publishing, and archives using technology as its platform for communication during calamity in the United States and why it is important that this tradition continues during COVID-19 and in the new decade. The intent of this article is to make those who are unaware aware of the use of digital technologies in the 20th century from an African American perspective through publishing and archiving, as well as community art spaces.

I combine maternal feminist experiences with hand-built ceramic vessels to create functional ritual objects. Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood transformed me. I am not just “mother" but also “artist” and “woman:” this multiplicity is intersubjectivity. I reconciled my conflicting priorities through my art with authentic testimony, memorialization, and activism. Rich red earthenware is clothed with rhythmic, radial pinch marks and stylized floral illustrations. Pottery has a strong association with the body, combining naturally with corporeal forms. My installation and performance pieces use the pot's function as a conceptual vehicle. Perhaps a little solemn reflection kneeling before Vessel of the Female Spirit or listening by Fountain will make my viewers better stewards of their selves, the mothers in their lives, and this precious planet.

In my work, I explore the ancient occult concept of the egregore or collective thought-form and its continued relevance in contemporary life. One might not think of the systems that we operate in today as ritual in nature, especially those that utilize new technology. We may imagine cyberspace as the ultimate rational and objective realm where all things can be categorized, quantified, and monetized. However, it is a place saturated with ceremonial situations upon close inspection. I seek out these ceremonies of niche digital communities and reconstruct them in new forms operating adjacent to their original stream.

My artwork uses the traditions of printmaking, photography, and fiber arts to dissect the myths, history, and current moment of American culture. My methodology includes photographing sites where governmental and capital power is most present. Photography is my tool for documenting the present, while quilting and printmaking are my way of reflecting on and digesting ideological concepts that are present in our culture. The quilt is a symbol of comfort in our personal ideologies. My work aims to destigmatize direct action and encourages the viewer to reevaluate how meaningful change can be made today.

Working to unravel my sense of the world and challenge the narratives and beliefs I hold as truths; I have created a reimagined and surreal bathroom that offers a private and vulnerable space filled with hidden horrors. The animated, imperfect, decayed, and cracked bathroom forms bridge the gap between the impermanent fragility of memory and the ongoing beliefs of a personal narrative. I worked to overcome the assumption that, to heal, something must be completely resolved within itself. Instead, I offer that healing is an undescribed area, that is unmeasurable, and it is forever evolving and never finished.

Photography, as a way of recording, is often high-definition and highly descriptive. Therefore, photography has a close relationship with visual perception. In my soft and abstract photographic images, the particularity of time and place is deliberately diluted, and the traditional objects in the photographic images are eliminated to challenge the viewer to locate themselves in relation to the photographs. The ambiguity of the photograph stimulates the viewer's self-consciousness to the greatest extent, while also spurring profound examination of the particular ways one expects photographs to affect them.

Since my youth in Ukraine, I have been inspired by the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who went to outer space in April 1961. Since then I have been imagining the fragments of an unknown space that is divided into a variety of different felt locations. I am interested in envisioning fractured terrains, where the intrusion of sharp elements interact with a soft transparent and atmospheric space. I want to create a sense of discord as a metaphorical reflection on the absurd, political situation in Ukraine where I am originally from. For me, navigating or transitioning from one imaginary space to another through the act of making painting feels equivalent to experiencing a new place for the first time.

Brief Artist Statement by Shellita Tow as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Fragmenting Time” in the Cora Stafford Gallery on the campus of the University of North Texas on April 15-20, 2021.

Through painting, I use materiality to describe the material world. By rooting my practice in visual culture and art history, I seek to extend the meaning of images beyond their initial form. The coalescing of opposing and complimentary formal elements accentuate the visual and contextual friction. This allows the work to exist in an ambiguous state. Seen together, my works appear disparate, but they suggest alternative meanings through association with one another. The works can exist on their own, but engage in dialogue when juxtaposed against each other. Although about specific occurrences, the works afford the viewer their own interpretations.

Black’s work presents The Ubiquitous, an entity that propagates into subhuman beings that ravage the deserts in search of sacrificial circles or homing beacons. Their physical nature is heavily influenced by: Languid, liquid human body language; the otherworldly visage and tenacity of plant life; the heaving monstrosity of mountains and rock formations; and the joyous allegory of movie monsters, puppets, and pulp fantasy. The Ubiquitous is explored in Black’s whimsical writings and intensive drawings which are characterized by her mark’s immediacy; and her work seeks to understand this Being’s purpose, function, and correlation to her own life..

Brief Artist Statement by Randal Robins as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Interiority” in the Cora Stafford Gallery on the campus of the University of North Texas on March 15-25, 2021.

My artwork is a record of mundane yet impactful experiences of everyday life. The subject of memory and my interest in pictorial space create a visual narrative of the physical and metaphorical ways I navigate the world. I envision space as sometimes a place of comfort, or at times a souvenir of a distant event. Through my paintings, I process and rediscover the past through the intimacy and tactility of mark-making. Each work presents a bittersweet narrative where I examine the complex circumstances that have brought me to a specific moment in time.

Memory Beast was a series of experiments in multispecies collaborative storytelling. A new tool was created, a memory beast, a holotype representing our ideas of specific species, based on memories and drawings collected in participatory research. The fabricated memory beasts, placed next to their biological counterparts, made visible the conflation of living species with personal memory and cultural imagery. Using this new tool, implanted with sonic recordings of cows, the beginnings of an interspecies pidgin language was developed. Memory Beast imagined and enacted new pathways to finite flourishing on a wounded earth, planting story seeds for alternative realities.

Brief Artist Statement by Sean Lopez as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "The Always Girls and Forever Boys” at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas, TX on April 17-18, 2021.

Brief Artist Statement by Jihye Han as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "11,009km” at the Goldmark Cultural Center in Dallas, TX on April 9-May 7, 2021.

Brief Artist Statement by Maria Villanueva as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Legend Systems: an escape to a hidden land” in the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building Atrium on the campus of the University of North Texas on March 1-5, 2021.

Brief Artist Statement by Naomi Peterson as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "liminal_ties” in the Cora Stafford Gallery on the campus of the University of North Texas from April 12-22, 2021.