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.

CESTA 2025 Winter, Spring, and Summer Undergraduate Research Program Applications Are Open!

The applications for the 2025 CESTA Undergraduate Programs are open! CESTA Undergraduate Programs is your gateway to cutting-edge exploration at the intersection of technology and the humanities.

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 (PhD Candidate).

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

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Featured Project

The Senegalese Slave Liberations Project, led by Professors Richard Roberts, Joel Cabrita, and Fatoumata Seck at Stanford, Babacar Fall and Ibrahima Seck in Senegal, and Rebecca Wall at Hamilton College, together with Joshua Goodwin at Stanford and Erica Ivins at Columbia University, is investigating slavery and  freedom in  19th-century West Africa.

How is humanities research transformed in a digital age? How can we harness the power of digitization in order to recover, preserve, and curate cultures and cultural artifacts? Like no other place on campus, we work across the boundary typically separating the humanities and technology, asking essential questions about the future of humanistic thought.
Giovanna Ceserani
Faculty Director

EVENTS

December
10
Date
Tuesday, December 10, 2024. 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Location
Building 160, Wallenberg Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
Room 433A

NEWS & BLOGS

Below is an interview our Center Manager, Eren Yurek, conducted with Elaine Lai (current COLLEGE Lecturer, 2024 CESTA DH Research Fellow, and a PhD graduate of Stanford's Religious Studies Department) and her collaborator, Aftab Hafeez, (Head of Spatial Audio UX research at Google) on their digital humanities projects on Buddhist Studies.
CESTA has worked with more than 700 undergraduate researchers, offering them more than 1100 internships, for the last 13 years. Our programming empowers students to apply technologies across the Humanities and Social Sciences in ways that enhance our understanding of the world.
Giovanna Ceserani reflects on the meaning of open access for digital humanities in her new Arcade article.
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.
Kiana Hu
Undergraduate Research Intern

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.