Current URAP Projects

Faculty Lead: Blanca Ramirez Units: Department of Sociology, Latino Research Institute Meeting Time: Mondays, 12-1 pm This research project supports the Database of Texas Immigration Legal Aid (2016-2026) which documents the shifting legal terrain conditions impacting non-profit immigrant legal aid organizations. To better understand the changing funding conditions at Texas legal aid nonprofits, this database will collect government data (such as IRS filings, from ProPublica and Guidestar, press releases, budget information), newspaper articles from Lexus Nexus database that include funding changes, and organizational documents spanning the First Trump administration to the present year (2016-2026). Student researchers will learn to use online databases (such as Lexus Nexus, ProPublica, and GuideStar), gain skills in gathering data from multiple sources, making collective data coding decisions, and writing an accessible report of these changing conditions. Students will explore the relationship between policy shifts (federal and state) and the nonprofit sector, harnessing an understanding in how funding structures the nonprofit sector. Moreover, students will build experience with data analysis, nonprofit literacy, and public-facing scholarship.

Faculty Leads: Edmund T. Gordon, Lydia Okabe, and Andrew Britt

Units: Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis (IUPRA), Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 1-2 pm

The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis (IUPRA) serves as an interdisciplinary, practice-oriented research institute and student research methodology unit at the University of Texas. IUPRA accomplishes this through select research working groups.

• The Central Texas Database Project: This research project aims to use census data from 1850 to 1950 to make rich historical information available for faculty and graduate student research, IUPRA experiential learning initiatives, and public use.
• Emerging Technologies: This research project seeks to foreground questions about the ethical and social dimensions of these technologies and draw historical parallels to earlier periods of disruptive innovation. The research aims to critically evaluate how key emerging technologies are shaping contemporary society, with particular attention to their ethical implications.
• African Database Initiative: This research project aims to create repositories of harmonized government microdata from household surveys administered throughout the African region. Once completed, it will provide open-access demographic resources for faculty and graduate student researchers, IRP experiential learning initiatives, and the public.
• GXNECOLOGX JUSTICE LAB: This research project seeks to design visual and educational resources and materials, community projects, and experimental research methods to address the injustices in healthcare that impact Black queer folks in the U.S. and across the African Diaspora. The lab will also include design projects for Black feminist research on sexual violence in medicine.

Student reserachers will work on at least on of these research projects. Students will conduct critical social science through hands-on experience in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research, including demography, public health, archival history, and spatial analysis. Students may be expected to work with/learn ArcGIS/GIS, Python, R, SPSS, Adobe, and more to contribute to ongoing database initiatives focused on various regions, including Africa and Central Texas. Students will become familiar with various stages of research methods such as data collection, cleaning, manuscript development, and analysis.

 

Faculty Lead: Peniel Joseph

Units: Department of History, LBJ School of Public Affairs

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 1-2 pm

What are the origins of political partisanship in the 21st century? Where are the voices calling us toward consensus and building a beloved community? This research project seeks to probe these and other questions about the strength, resilience, and precarity of American democracy through the lens of writer James Baldwin, one of the most important voices for justice in the postwar era. 

Student researchers will conduct archival research to identify a wide range of political voices from the 1950s and 1960s to the present who debated voting rights, civil rights, and social justice across the political and ideological spectrum, especially those who engaged in dialogue with one another. Students will be assigned different historical eras and research a debate, event, controversy, or election that illustrates the multifaceted and heterodox nature of American democratic thought during these times. 

Faculty Lead: Scott Wolford

Unit: Department of Government, Correlates of War (COW) Project

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 9:30-10:30 am

This research project supports the Correlates of War (COW) Project—the longest‑running and most widely used dataset on armed conflict in the world—by identifying territorial states and the wars they fought from 1816 to the present. By working across different regions and time periods, the project traces how states formed and changed over time. Using maps, encyclopedias, and historical sources, the goal is to build a clear and consistent global record of state membership and conflict.

Students researchers will dig through the historical record to help identify a global sample of territorial states and the wars they wage from 1816 to the present. Students will work in a chosen region and time period using sources like maps, encyclopedias, and histories to code the existence and key features of states. Students will learn the fundamentals of measurement and data collection, including the relationships between concepts, reliability, and validity. Students will also develop skills in finding, sorting through, and judging the quality of historical sources as they apply operational rules to historical political entities.

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Faculty Lead: Charlie Nagle

Units: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Speech Learning Lab

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 11 am-12 pm

Does living in a more Spanish-saturated neighborhood leave a measurable imprint on how people perceive and produce speech sounds? Austin is known for having a high concentration of Spanish speakers, yet Spanish-speaking density varies considerably across the city, with some neighborhoods being some "Spanish-saturated" than others. This research project aims to study how people engage with speech sounds, knowing that sound systems in our minds are continuously reshaped by our linguistic exposure.

Student researchers will read and synthesize relevant literature, learn about experimental design, recruit and collect data from human subjects, participate in acoustic analyses in Praat, and analyze quantitative and qualitative data. Along the way, students will learn to use a citation manager, build tasks in Gorilla Experiment Builder, run Praat scripts, and get hands-on experience with R/RStudio. By the end of the semester, students will have contributed to a large-scale dataset which describes pronunciation patterns among residents of Spanish-English bilingual Austin. Cumulatively, students will have gained practical, transferable skills in experimental design, data analysis, ethical research practices, and dissemination of research findings.

Faculty Lead: Pablo Requena

Units: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Language Variation and Learning Lab

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 11 am-12pm

In Córdoba, Argentina, people say "vos" for "you" everywhere: at home, with friends, and even in class. Yet, the instructions children read in their school notebooks have long used the ""standard"" tú forms instead. This reserach project aims to investigate the cultural differences between "tú" and "vos" in Argentine classrooms and unpack where these differences stem from. 

Student researchers will code instructions from Argentine school notebooks written between the 1960s and today, to see how and when "vos" entered the classroom. Students will then use AI speech recognition on a secure local system to transcribe conversations recorded in Córdoba and examine where the software gets this dialect wrong. Students will also learn to code linguistic data, check agreement between coders, handle research data responsibly, and analyze patterns of language change.

Knowledge of Spanish is required. Students who are proficient in Spanish are encouraged to apply.

Faculty Leads: Levi Thompson, Nick Henry, and Rosemary Lester-Smith

Unit: Department of Middle Eastern Studies

Meeting Time: Mondays, 11am-12pm

"​​This research project looks at how language works under “imperfect” conditions, such as when a speaker has a strong accent or a neurological voice disorder that affects how they sound. This project explores how these factors shape communication in different languages. By drawing on research from language learning and speech pathology, the project aims to better understand how voice disorders influence speech production and how listeners process what they hear.

Student researchers will discuss readings in weekly meetings and receive hands‑on training in experimental design, data collection, and acoustic analysis. They will help analyze vocal samples from previous semesters, assist with lab‑based experiments, and learn to process and interpret speech data. Students will build transferable skills in collaboration, communication, and problem‑solving, and may also contribute to research talks on campus or at future national conferences.

Students who are proficient in Arabic are encouraged to apply, but this is not required.

Faculty Lead: Brent Landau

Units: Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas, Department of Religious Studies

Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 12-1 pm

Can you read this? Would you like to learn how?

Anytime you read a translation of an ancient text, be it the Bible or Homer, that translation is based on manuscripts scattered throughout the world. This research project will work to decipher an early Christian legend about the Magi (a.k.a. the Wise Men from the Christmas Story) that exists in more than 100 manuscripts with unique features. 

Student researchers will learn how to read medieval Latin manuscripts in a range of handwriting styles and with numerous abbreviations to transcribe versions of this Magi legend. In doing so, students will help produce a critical edition of this legend that notes all the variants and differences between the manuscripts and ultimately presents the earliest and most accurate Latin text of the Magi legend.

Knowledge of Latin (min. two years at high school level) is required. Students who are currently studying Latin at UT are strongly encouraged to apply.

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Faculty Lead: James Curley

Units: Department of Psychology, Behavioral and Social Data Science

Meeting Time: Mondays, 10-11 am

What can a century of postcards tell us about how people in Britain expressed feelings and kept in touch? This reserach project aims to build a geocoded text corpus of British postcards dating from approximately 1900 to 2000. The corpus will pair transcribed messages with dates and locations when these can be reliably identified. 

Students will develop and test a workflow for transcribing handwritten cards, including AI-assisted transcription, independent human review, and methods for measuring agreement and recording uncertainty. Students will learn introductory natural language processing and statistical approaches to comparing texts across periods and places. Using these methods, the team will explore changes in emotional tone, greetings and sign-offs, and the kinds of news people shared. By the end of the semester, students will have contributed to a documented pilot corpus of up to 1,000 postcards that can support many future research questions.

Faculty Lead: Andrew Britt

Units: Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

Meeting Time: Thursdays, 11 am-12 pm

This project centers on the production and critical investigation of historical, location-based, and narrative augmented reality (AR) experiences. The project asks how AR, understood not as a consumer product but as a powerful emerging narrative medium, can facilitate compelling encounters with disappeared pasts in contemporary urban landscapes. These AR scenes are not static reconstructions of the past located in museums or at official heritage sites; instead, they are dynamic narrative experiences, accessible via phone or tablet, sited in the exact places where consequential processes of urban redevelopment have rendered significant pasts visibly absent. 

Student researchers will develop and apply competencies in the following areas: conducting archival research and organizing historical sources; testing location-based augmented reality applications (on UT’s campus); developing 3D models, textures, and animations based on historical photographs; designing UX, graphic, sonic, and/or textual content; developing scenes within the Unity game engine; and project management for public-facing digital humanities and emerging technologies. 

Portuguese and Spanish language proficiencies are welcome but not required. 

Faculty Lead: Tanya Clement

Unit: Humanities Institute

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 3-4 pm

This research project aims to make working with audio and visual (AV) primary source materials useful to educators in college and advanced high school humanities courses by developing an application (AVAnnotate) that is a free and open-source workflow and application for creating digital exhibits and editions with AV materials. The preparation that AV primary sources demand of instructors in terms of technology and access means these materials rarely appear in the classroom in meaningful ways – if at all. These rich materials remain functionally out of reach, even as cultural heritage institutions work to make them publicly accessible. 

Student researchers will begin by researching existing educational resources and case studies, grounding their designs in the skill standards from archival professional bodies (ACRL-SAA) and educational institutions (AP, IB). They will then propose their own plan for the project, addressing the needs of instructors, students, and the Harry Ransom Center. Students will then conduct independent research in the collections, using AVAnnotate’s annotation and tagging capabilities to build and present their educational materials. Following workshops in collaboration with practicing educators and feedback from at least one pilot educator, students will revise and finalize their AVAnnotate project. By the end of the semester, students will have created a work of public-facing scholarship that also functions as immediately useful classroom material. Students will build skills in archival research, instructional design, multimodal writing for various audiences, and digital scholarship. 

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Faculty Lead: Robert Josephs

Units: Department of Psychology, Dell Medical School

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 12-1:30 pm

The cause of endometriosis is unclear; currently, the only diagnosis is observation of endometrial lesions during laparoscopic surgery, with an average of 7.7 years from symptoms to diagnosis. Thus, there is a dire need for a non-surgical alternative which has the potential for early diagnosis. This UT research project aims to develop a non-invasive, nimble diagnostic platform that is able to accomodate testing at providers' offices, clinics, and hospitals. Tissue samples are then sent for analysis to a lab on campus.

Student researchers will familiarize themselves with the literature, meet weekly to discuss papers, and participate in the actual data collection and analysis. Data collection will involve talking with pre-op patients, administering consent forms, bringing cell samples to the lab for analysis, and learning the various techniques used to analyze the samples.

Faculty Lead: Leta Deithloff

Units: Health and Society, Department of Sociology

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 11 am-12 pm

This research project will continue a past maternal healthcare profile by investigating a region of Texas with the greatest healthcare access limitations. The spring semester research team will investigate why this area is so disproportionately represented and aims to clarify what resources exist, where gaps remain, and how recent policy changes may be affecting maternal health outcomes.

Student researchers will contribute to this research by examining existing data and records, interviews with regional practitioners, and feedback from a small cohort of Texas moms. By the end of the semester, students will present the findings of their grounded theory causal analysis results. Throughout the semester, they will contribute to a growing statewide profile of maternal health access in Texas.

Faculty Lead: Pavithra Vasudevan

Unit: Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 2-3 pm

This research project will introduce students to the principles and practices of doing community-engaged ethnographic/social science research through a partnership with Austin-based environmental justice organizations. Environmental justice (EJ) is the social movement based on the principle that all people deserve to live in a safe and healthy environment. “Worldbuilding” emphasizes that visions for a just and sustainable world emerge from the long-term grassroots work of communities struggling to find alternatives to their current conditions. Worldbuilding also speaks to the experimental nature of research conducted in collaboration with and in service to local communities. 

Student researchers will learn how to build a research program grounded in ethical and reciprocal relations with the lands we occupy and the communities that steward them. Students will have the opportunity to learn from and alongside community members who are currently doing that work in Austin, and to contribute their time and learning meaningfully. The specifics of each project will be developed in consultation with the community partners, with support provided by the program’s graduate mentors.

Faculty Lead: Yuhao Kang

Unit: Department of Geography and the Environment

Meeting Time: Thursdays, 5-6 pm

This research project explores how GeoAI and Generative AI can help us understand how people perceive and experience real-world environments. We will connect geographic information with human-centered data such as environmental sound or brain data to study how places can be sensed, modeled, predicted, and reconstructed using artificial intelligence (AI). 

Student researchers will contribute to different parts of the project depending on their interests and skills. Activities may include collecting urban sound and noise data, organizing and processing geospatial datasets, analyzing sound or brain data, working with maps and street-view imagery, and experimenting with AI and generative models. Students will gain hands-on experience with research design, data collection, geospatial analysis, scientific communication, and emerging GeoAI methods. Throughout the semester, students will work collaboratively on a focused research question within the larger project. Their contributions may support ongoing research on urban sound and noise prediction, sound-to-environment generation, or reconstructing geographic environments from human brain data.

Faculty Lead: Naomi Campa

Units: Department of Classics, Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas

Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 1-2 pm

Major wars, internal stasis, economic opportunity, and environmental disasters variously combined to drive migration across the Mediterranean in Ancient Greece. Today, approaches to modern migration may be applied profitably to the ancient data, although many remain unexplored. But just what is a migrant? Why did the move? Are there directional patterns? This research project investigates migration in the ancient Greek world by building a large‑scale digital database that collects and systematizes evidence of migration across all available Classical‑period texts. Grounded in global migration studies, the project seeks to build an accessible resource that illuminates the history of migration as a universal and enduring human experience. Its enriched, machine‑readable dataset aims to support new questions about ancient mobility for both scholars and the general public.

Student researchers will attend weekly meetings, complete onboarding in migration studies and digital database methods, and participate in hands‑on workshops for data entry and review. They will read ancient texts translated to English, consult commentaries, enter and evaluate data, and check entries for consistency. Students may also explore linked open data or, if they have a computer science background, contribute to programming tasks or data ontologies. Throughout the semester, they will gain experience gathering data, understanding research foundations, thinking about migration as a complex phenomenon, and engaging with ancient Greek history.