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

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 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.

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

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NEWS & BLOGS

The Center for Spatial and Textual and Analysis (CESTA) is pleased to welcome the summer 2025 Undergraduate Interns, a community of digital humanities researchers.
Congratulations to the SLP team on the publication of their wonderful work on the politics and ethics of naming of enslaved people in Digital Humanities projects—read the collection of essays they have put together on this essential question for digital projects
How have colonial and imperial regimes imagined and represented the Persian Gulf?
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.