Welcome to CESTA
At CESTA, students and faculty combine the power of humanistic investigation with new technologies to document, analyze and understand the changing human experience.
2025 Summer Undergraduate Interns
The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is pleased to welcome 17 Undergraduate Interns, a community of digital humanities researchers.
Reflections on the Digital Humanities
A Stanford Arcade and CESTA collaboration
Articles and interviews of digital humanities practicioners and professors at Stanford. Curated and edited by Charlotte Lindemann (Stanford PhD Alum).
2024 CESTA Research Anthology
The capstone for our interns is the submission of a research report under the supervision of their project leads. The Anthology brings together these reports, offering a student's-eye view on the work
Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash
Introducing our Taxonomy of DH Methods and Approaches
Read about a unique feature of our new publications page: a taxonomy of methods and approaches which can be used to filter our publications
Featured Project
The Senegal Liberation Project, led by Professors Richard Roberts and Rachel Jean-Baptiste at Stanford, Babacar Fall and Ibrahima Seck in Senegal, and Rebecca Wall at Loyola Marymount University, together with Joshua Goodwin at Stanford and Erica Ivins at Columbia University, is investigating slavery and freedom in 19th-century West Africa.
This is an exciting time for CESTA. The growing community that we’ve built over the past fifteen years is at the center of many fascinating new initiatives on campus. From the new Data Science degree in Artistic and Cultural Analysis, to emerging faculty projects and public partnerships, from the challenges and opportunities of AI models in the humanities, to the growth of maker culture, CESTA is at the nexus of all of these new ways of thinking about the humanities and the arts.
EVENTS
Building 160, Wallenberg Hall, Fourth Floor
NEWS & BLOGS
Throughout my time with CESTA, I've had the opportunity to learn and work on many different things that I'm interested in, such as working with historical documents, coding music analysis programs, and graphic designing for the anthology. In each project I've been a part of, it has been exciting to see how much technological innovation has to offer for humanities research, and how interdisciplinary study can enhance collaboration from people with different backgrounds and perspectives.
CESTA is open to all persons concerned with the study and teaching of digital humanities, in that field’s most capacious definition. Our Center welcomes researchers and interested participants from all walks of academic life, including, but not limited to, faculty and academic-related staff, postdoctoral fellows, graduates and undergraduates, independent scholars, and technological experts. We aim to encourage an environment of collegiality and collaboration, diversity, inclusion, and academic freedom for all participants.
We explicitly affirm the right of students and junior faculty to receive supportive, professional mentoring that respects their intellectual freedom and personal integrity. We expect anyone coming to CESTA, or representing CESTA, to abide by and promote these values so that together we may build a stronger, more welcoming, considerate, and equal community.