About CESTA

Who we are

CESTA is an internationally renowned digital humanities center based in Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. Now in its 15th year, CESTA has, from its inception, combined emerging digital methodologies and tools with traditional research methods of analysis and interpretation in textual, visual, and spatial analysis. In partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center, CESTA serves as the hub of an international network of fellows, visiting scholars, students, and alumni. Through collaborations with scholars and students across campus, across the Americas, and across the world, our research investigates pressing questions about human culture, history, experience, and endeavor. The projects and labs hosted by CESTA explore places, global spaces, texts, textual artifacts, data visualization, digital curation, preservation and display, linked data and interoperability, and sustainability. As a scholarly community CESTA supports and encourages cutting-edge work across the humanities and the interpretative social sciences.

Mission

CESTA is committed to collaborative, open, inclusive, and ethical scholarship. We seek to set a standard for best practices in all our endeavors. We encourage experimentation, flexible thinking, and productive risk-taking in the pursuit of excellence in digital research. Through our major research projects, fellowship and assistantship programs, seminars, workshops and informal initiatives, CESTA is dedicated to nurturing, training and professionalizing scholars of the future from a variety of disciplines, who will learn how to ask and answer data-driven questions focused on cultural, environmental, historical, social, and textual issues.

Support

CESTA’s expansion and growth to support this variety of new projects, research groups, events and training programs is possible thanks to the support of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences, the Office of the Provost as well as that of the President, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and the Vice Provost for Graduate Education. In addition to the possibilities unlocked for us by internal and external grants, we are deeply grateful for the generous gifts of our donors.