The University of Texas Libraries announced the student recipient of the 2022 Map & Geospatial Collections Explorer Fellowship at a GIS Day event on Wednesday, November 16.
The Fellowship was created as an annual award to encourage scholarly and creative use of maps and geospatial assets from University of Texas Libraries collections, such as those made available through the Texas GeoData portal, the Collections portal and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.
Geography graduate Stephanie Zeller was named the student recipient of this year’s award. Zeller is a researcher, artist, and writer studying climate visualization, epistemology and communication in diverse publics as a Geography MA + PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated from UT Austin with degrees in Public Relations and Studio Art and minors in Business and Spanish in 2020. Prior experience includes work with the Texas Health Journal, NASA's Johnson Space Center, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, StarDate Magazine and Radio, Los Alamos National Labs, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Get Us PPE.
Zeller’s 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 Map 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 in maps of the Hawaiian islands in the PCL Map Collection.
Fellows are required to showcase their project progress through a Libraries hosted event and their work is featured in one or more Libraries’ repositories, ensuring long-term preservation and a citable persistent link to project outcomes.
