GIS & Geospatial Data Services

The UT Libraries Map & Geospatial Collections Fellowship is designed to encourage students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin to develop scholarly and creative projects that utilize or enhance the Libraries’ map and geospatial data resources. These geospatial resources have contributed to the scholarly and creative output of UT scholars for decades and it is the goal of this fellowship to preserve, augment, and promote these assets so that they can be made more useful and accessible than ever before.

Call for Proposals

Click the button below to view/download the 2025 Call for Proposals for full details about the Fellowship including information about requirements, proposal evaluation criteria, and submission guidelines.

Proposal Form

Click the link below to complete the 2025 Proposal Form.

Info Session

The 2025 MGCE Fellowship Information Session took place on Tuesday, September 9th at 1:00pm in the PCL Scholars Lab Data and online via Zoom. Click the link below to watch the recording of this session.

Eligibility

• Students at all levels and from all disciplines who are currently enrolled in a degree earning program at the University of Texas at Austin at time of proposal submission.
• Faculty and post-docs with an active paid appointment at the University of Texas at Austin at time of proposal submission.

Student and faculty/post-doc proposals are considered as separate submission categories and will be judged independently, with the intention of awarding one $1500 fellowship per category per year. Award funds will be dispersed in payments, with $500 provided during the fall semester when winners are announced and the remaining $1000 provided upon successfully meeting the presentation and publication/sharing requirements described below. Award winners will have their work featured in one or more UT Libraries repositories which will provide long term preservation, a citable persistent link, and recognition of their accomplishments and contributions.

Timeline

Call for Proposals:	Now available!
Information Session:	September 9th at 1:00pm
Submission deadline:	Monday, October 6th 2025 by 11:59pm
Winners contacted:	Early November
Winners publicly announced:	GIS Day (Wednesday Nov. 19, 2025)

Sign Up for Fellowship Announcements

If you want to stay up to date about UTL MGCE Fellowship announcements, visit https://utlists.utexas.edu/sympa/info/gis-users to subscribe to the UT GIS user email list.

Questions?

Please contact utl-gis@austin.utexas.edu if you have any questions about the Fellowship that are not addressed in this guide or in the call for proposals.

Student Fellowship: Allison Lang

The Mapping Resistance project will produce a digital interactive map and a geodataset of community responses to mining projects in Argentina. Since the 1990s, new “mega-mining” techniques and increasing demand for minerals has led to foreign investment and local resistance throughout Latin America. While many communities in Argentina have organized to stop mines and protect water, mobilization for environmental rights has not been universal. Thus, to display and analyze community responses, we will use QGIS to digitize and georeference the geological map of Argentina in the UT Geology Library. We will then overlay this map with geospatial data on affected communities from 4 sources: 1.) geological and mining maps of Argentine provinces from the UT collection; 2.) datasets on mega-mining projects from the Argentine government; 3.) census data on sociodemographic characteristics of nearby communities; and 4.) a dataset of our creation that documents collective action in these places.

Faculty Fellowship: Dr. Gengchen Mai

In this project, we will develop a Map2Loc framework that utilizes multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (i.e., GPT-4V) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for historical map image georeference prediction. Map2Loc will be used to predict the geospatial footprints of map images in the UT library that are not georeferenced.

For full details about the awarding of the 2022 UTL MGCE Fellowships view the UT Libraries press release.

Student Fellowship: Stephanie Zeller
Project Description: This project will leverage multi-modal engagement methods and transdisciplinary, practice-led research to create an interactive exhibit in partnership with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) focused on biodiversity loss due to climate change in the Hawaiian islands. This exhibit will bring together physical maps and map scans from the PCL collection with a physical model; hand-drawn prints of specific plant and animal species at risk; photographs; and digital visualizations of E3SM Earth System Model climate simulation data of the Hawaiian island region, encoded with custom, hand-made glyph artifacts. Each piece of art will be linked to specific locations on the PCL’s map of the Hawaiian islands.

For full details about the awarding of the 2021 UTL MGCE Fellowships view the UT Libraries press release.