Meet the CESTA Summer 2020 Interns

 

Elias is part of class of 2023 and hopes to major in Economics and Mathematics. Elias is involved with two projects at CESTA. For Life in Quarantine at the Poetic Media Lab, Elias is in charge of outreach to art initiatives surrounding the pandemic, prison and the pandemic stories/initiatives, and mutual aid societies which have sprung up in response to COVID-19. For Global Urbanization and its Discontents, he is focused on HTML interface coding and a literature review on AI and CV work with Google Street View images. In his free time, he enjoys running, A24 movies, and being on twitter, making Spotify playlists, and talking about Lorde.

Manya Bansal is a rising sophomore from New Delhi, India, pursuing a major in Mathematics. She has worked with CESTA before on the Global Medieval Sourcebook Project and is currently working with the Computational Border Studies team as a full-stack web developer. In addition, she is also working on developing a classification algorithm that can help predict asylum court decisions. She spends an extraordinary time listening to music despite having no musical talent herself, and enjoys watching stand-up comedy.

 

Karunya is a rising junior majoring in English and French, and is currently holed up in her hometown of San Ramon, California. She’s working on parsing out the intricacies of Egyptianaesthetics in South Africa for her CESTA project, Egypt in South Africa. She’d love to say she writes long, eloquent philosophical treatises in her free time, but she doesn’t.

Kimmy is a rising junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Creative Writing. Kimmy is part of the Land Talk and Urban Ecology of the Pandemic project. Her primary roles include web development for the Land Talk website and creating a dynamic data visualizations application to study the impact of COVID-19 on animal behavior for a research presentation at the 2020 Animal Behavior Society Conference.

Leah is a rising sophomore, who plans to major in Computer Science and/or English. She works on two projects at the Literary Lab: Novel World-Building and Personhood. Her primary roles include data entry and text mining/analysis while learning more about word embedding and working in R.

Krain is a rising junior with majors in Computer Science and Architectural Design. This summer, she is working on geo-spatial analysis, map layer creation, and gathering research metadata for the Interactive Nolli Map project.

Cat is the class of 2023 studying Linguistics and Biology (or maybe something else). Cat works with Dr. Laura Patricia Stokes on the Panic and Pandemic project and is passionate about many different types of storytelling, including presentation of historical research through data visualization. Cat has been meeting all kinds of beautiful old books, learning unfortunate words in French and German, and picking up new programming tricks since starting this project.

Karen is a rising sophomore planning on majoring in Symbolic Systems. She is working with the Grammar of Gender and Personhood projects in the Literary Lab, as well as on Land Talk & Urban Ecology of the Pandemic. This summer, she hopes to unravel theories and discover patterns through machine learning and data visualization.

Joshua is a junior studying History and Philosophy along the Pre-Law track. He works on the Senegalese Liberations Papers Project. His research involves translating, transcribing, and analyzing a dataset of over 25,000 slave liberations in colonial French West Africa, identifying demographic trends within a period of over 50 years. He hopes to align the dataset’s location information with spatial maps as well as create infometrics and other forms of data visualization for future presentation.

Khuyen is a rising senior majoring in Symbolic Systems and Comparative Literature. Khuyen works with Dr. Alice Staveley on the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a digital archive for publishing houses in the early 20th century. This summer Khuyen is working on a redesign of the website for the project.

Miranda is a first-year student interested in studying literature, creative writing, and how to tie both to social change. Miranda is collaborating on new project, Counter-Surveilling the State, where she is helping to develop an ethnosurvey and working on understanding R and text mining. Miranda enjoys storytelling, being in nature, and finding new sources of inspiration.

Olivia Manes is a junior majoring in International Relations and Comparative Literature from Cathedral City, CA. As part of the Latin American Borders project, she researches events and policies in Latin America that have driven migration to the US since 2008. In her free time, she likes practicing her Spanish, reading, writing, hiking and spending time with friends and family.

Palmer is a member of the class of 2021 and majoring in Religious Studies, with interests in early Christianity, theology, and philosophy. This summer, he is working on geospatial visualizations for both the Social Networks in the Early Islamic Middle East and Panic and Pandemic in Early Modern Europe projects.

Alana is a rising sophomore and passionate about visual art and bioscience. She has been a research assistant for Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic since Spring quarter. Alana helps with outreach, writing blog posts, and creating graphics for the website and social media.

Barry is a rising sophomore and hopes to major in Computer Science and minor in Management Science & Engineering. He is also part of the project team for Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic. His interests include listening to podcasts, reading contemporary African literature and finding new sources of inspiration.

Lily is a rising senior majoring in English Literature and minoring in Creative Writing. She is currently working on the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) with Professor Alice Staveley to redesign the project website. She is also researching punctuation and rhythm in Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Riley is a rising junior majoring in Comparative Literature and Symbolic Systems. She is interning at the Literary Lab and hopes to get involved with a few projects, like Short Stories and Fan Fiction. While this continues to be a crazy summer, in Riley’s spare time you can find her listening to music and jamming out.

Carolyn is a sophomore planning to major in Psychology and double minor in East Asian Studies and Creative Writing. This summer, she is working on a Text Technologies project that involves examining how archivists build digital archives and how those digital archives affect our understanding of history. She is also a member of the Stanford Band, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and the Leland Quarterly.

Regina T.H. Ta is a rising sophomore with interests in Comparative Literature, Digital Humanities, and Symbolic Systems. Working with the Literary Lab has introduced her to methods for textual analysis, and she is fascinated by the possibility of extracting new stories and patterns from language.

Ryan is a rising senior majoring in Computer Science with a double minor in Comparative Literature and Philosophy. On campus, he’s been involved in acting and directing for student theater and is interested in game design. Ryan is collaborating with the Grand Tour project team for a second summer, with the goal of completing the digital publication.

Lily is a Symbolic Systems major and Modern Languages minor. She loves working with her mentor Dr. Bridget Algee-Hewitt and the other collaborators for the Latin American Border Project, and is passionate about creating accessible research for the voices that go unvalidated without a formal platform. When she’s not working, she enjoys sleeping in, reading, and watching movies.

Brooke is a rising senior and majoring in Management Science & Engineering. Brooke is collaborating on the new project Counter-Surveilling the State. Her role within the project is to build a mapping platform to track ICE raids throughout the U.S. using geospatial data, which will also incorporate ethnographic surveys of undocumented immigrants.

Panos is a rising senior and has majors in Biology and Comparative Literature, a minor in Sociology, and a coterm in Epidemiology and Clinical Research. This summer he is researching with the Literary Lab on the Epidemics, Personhood, and Short Stories projects.

Hannah is a rising junior, majoring in English and minoring in Human Biology. She is working on website design and archive development for Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Pandemic, a project producing a historical public archive documenting the COVID-19 pandemic. Hannah loves reading, music, and dogs.

Glede is a rising sophomore from Shenzhen, China, and is pursuing a double major in Gender Studies and Data Science. Glede is primarily organizing and archiving unpublished works from a talented African writer and political activist, Regina Twala, for the Visible Bodies project.

Audrey is a rising sophomore, potentially majoring in Product Design and Urban Studies. Audrey researches with the ​Urban Studies Lab​ led by Professor Quayson, investigating the “high streets” and literary representations of New York and London.

Katie Yoon is a rising sophomore and is studying International Relations and Symbolic Systems. Under the guidance of Dr. Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Katie is text mining bias in judicial asylum decisions in addition to investigating the factors contributing to deaths and apprehensions along the U.S.-México border.

Mark York is a rising senior and communications major, who is involved in both the George Horton Project, where he constructs and programs virtual reality sequences, and Text Technologies, where he is in charge of revamping the official website.

Dongming is a rising junior from China, with a major in Philosophy with a minor in Classics. This summer Dongming is researching with the Urban Studies Lab, collecting geographical information on commercial districts around the Victoria Harbour from Open Street Map and gathering background information on Hong Kong’s colonial, migration and commercial history. For this project, Dongming will analyze the kinds of shops, pedestrian volumes, and historical changes in these urban areas and in order to understand their significance in the city’s development.

Emily Zhang is a senior and is majoring in Symbolic Systems and minoring in Philosophy. She enjoys writing, drawing, and surfing. She has been a research assistant for Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic since Spring quarter and joined the project team for Land Talk this summer.

Zuyi is a rising senior and Religious Studies major from South Florida. As an intern on the Social Networks in the Early Islamic Middle East project, Zuyi primarily contributes to the character network analysis component of the project, charting the connections between different figures as they are documented in the 9th-century hagiographical text, "The Book of Governors."