Call for Projects

LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Research Fellowship 

The LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Research Fellowship program provides stipends of up to $3,000 for students and scholars to develop projects remotely with digital methods/platforms (examples) based on LLILAS research foci and Benson collection strengths in Latin American, U.S. Latine, African Diaspora, or Indigenous Studies using data, born-digital sources (e.g. websites, social media posts), and/or the Benson’s digitized holdings. Special consideration will be given to proposals that contribute to these initiatives:

• Archiving Black América: A LLILAS initiative to promote engagement with the Black Diaspora Archive housed at the Benson Collection. One award will be made to a proposal that meaningfully and ethically engages with collection materials and/or cultural heritage data created by or representing the Black diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America.
• AVAnnotate Project: An Initiative for Digital Humanities project that seeks to support the use of audiovisual materials in teaching, research, and public engagement, and the development of ethical practices and protocols for this type of cultural heritage. Up to two proposals will be awarded. Upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, and community scholars, regardless of institutional affiliation, may apply. These fellowships are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

Please consult a list of qualifying collections for these joint initiatives at the end of the attached policies. Unless you are applying for an AVAnnotate Project fellowship, all applicants must be graduate students or non-UT Austin scholars with a Bachelor’s degree. Recipients of a LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Fellowship in the last 2 years (2023-2024) are not eligible to apply.

The fellow must dedicate three to four weeks of work between March 1 and August 25, 2025 to the proposed project, working closely with Digital Scholarship staff to develop a project that could entail the following:

• Development of an original digital project aimed at facilitating the exploration and analysis of data and/or Benson digital collection materials;
• Curation of data/text sets from Benson digitized holdings to analyze with digital tools (e.g. mapping, text mining, network analysis, TEI);
• Creation of open educational digital resources (e.g. exhibitions and lesson plans that incorporate digital scholarship praxis);
• Experimentation with social platforms to engage global scholarly networks in the collaborative description, analysis, and interpretation of digitized primary sources and data.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Proposals must be submitted by FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2024 through this Qualtrics form: https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dcnjGaGWaozuGJo

For more examples, see a list of previously awarded projects.