Paid Undergraduate Research Opportunities in CESTA

Interested in picking up some research experience on campus? CESTA is now hiring undergraduate research assistants!

(This applcation period has passed)

About CESTA

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is an open and collaborative work environment, home to the Spatial History Project, the Literary Lab, the Poetic Media Lab, Text Technologies, Humanities + Design, and the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, among other initiatives. We work with faculty, graduate students, and postdocs from Stanford and around the world on digital humanities research projects that bring together paradigms from history, geography, literary studies, education, media and cultural studies, sociology, and more. For more information on CESTA’s projects and labs, which range from multi-layered maps of London and Rome to timelines of evolving text technologies to neural networks that read novels, please visit cesta.stanford.edu/project-labs.

CESTA seeks to hire undergraduate research assistants for a variety of projects in winter quarter of the 2016-17 academic year. Student tasks range from conducting traditional historical or archival research, learning new tools, developing interactive websites, creating databases and much more.

To Apply

If you are interested in working at CESTA, please fill out our application form no later than 12:00 PM on Wednesday, November 16. The application asks questions about your availability, experience, and interests. Look over the project descriptions below, and write a brief cover letter indicating why you might be a good fit. This is an opportunity for you to expand upon what you have included in your resume and apply those items to the projects you are interested in. Have your resume and cover letter ready to upload in a single PDF document at the end of the application form.

Prompt applications will receive preferential consideration. Any applications submitted after the deadline will be considered on an as needed basis.

Compensation

Research Assistants are supported through Federal Work Study, independent research credit, stipends, or faculty support. Students who are funded through a stipend will receive a one time payment of $800 for the entire quarter for a baseline of 5 hours per week. Students paid hourly are paid $16/hr and work between 5 to 10 hours per week. Students will have access to faculty and staff mentorship for their projects in addition to a great working space.

With over 30 rotating projects and new projects being added every quarter, we encourage to students to apply every quarter! Projects positions open up from quarter to quarter based on student availability so we encourage repeat applications.

Thank you for your interest; we look forward to meeting you. Give us a call or send us an email if you have any questions about the application process. We can be reached at 650-721-1385 or you can email us at cesta_stanford [at] stanford.edu (cesta_stanford[at]stanford[dot]edu).

 

Project Descriptions

Mapping the Early Modern Medicine Trade

Project Lead: Dr. Zachary Dorner

This project explores the construction of a bulk, global trade in British medicines during the long eighteenth century that connected South Asia, London, and the American colonies through the shared consumption of manufactured goods. The rise of this trade is part of the coming of capitalism and the legacy of the early modern scientific and financial revolutions.

The student will work closely with the lead instructor (Zachary Dorner, Stanford University) on two related tasks. The first is to turn an Excel database of medicine exports from 1700-1783 into a more easily accessible platform for understanding trends based on variables of time and geography. There will be opportunities for the student to take analysis of this data in his/her own directions that will open up creative, new avenues for historical inquiry. The second task is to visualize medicine recipes. From a single recipe, we can trace the global origins of a pharmaceutical preparation. This could include aloes from China and Borneo, mercury from Tibet, benzoin from Sumatra and Java, and gamboge from Cambodia and Thailand. This task presents an opportunity for the student to connect with the material dimension of history and to also gain experience working with textual sources in addition to visualizing a transnational commodity chain.

Responsibilities:

• Turn Excel database of medicine exports into widely accessible platform

• Visualize medicine recipes using design and data visualization tools

Requirements:

• Ability to work independently and with instructor on data input, analysis, and collection

• Ability to work with both textual and quantitative sources

Preferred:

• Experience with design and data visualization (Tableau, Carto, Mapbox)

• GIS experience

• Interest in the histories of trade and science

Web and Drupal Developer for Poetic Media Lab

Project Leads: Amir Eshel, Brian Johnsrud

The Poetic Media Lab seeks a Drupal developer to work on existing Drupal modules for the Lacuna Digital Learning Platform (http://www.lacunastories.com). Lacuna is an exploratory, interactive, and collaborative tool for learning in higher education. Stanford's own version of Lacuna (stanford.lacunastories.com) creates innovative reading and learning opportunities for students in courses in literature, history, PWR, and across campus.

If skills are on hand, the position also can include developing new modules to extend our platform for exploring, annotating, and learning collaboratively in college-level courses. We are seeking someone who is interested in being a collaborator and who will be invested in the project's long-term goals. The ideal candidate will also be interested in learning more about the field of digital humanities while gaining practical experience working in cross-disciplinary teams.

Benefits

• Flexible schedule

• Be a key member on a project used by your fellow students at Stanford and at other major universities

Responsibilities

• Debug existing Drupal modules

• Develop new modules, as needed

• Work in collaboration with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and developers at Stanford

Skills Required

• CSS, HTML

• PHP and Github experience

• Good communication skills and ability to work in an iterative, team-based environment

Optional (but helpful) Skills

• Javascript

• Drupal

Greece and Rome in South Africa

Project Lead: Prof. Grant Parker (Department of Classics and Center for African Studies)

Project description:

Ancient Greece and Rome have intersected with South African society in many, often surprising ways: these are what we seek to document in a digital museum. In it we shall present a wide variety of phenomena, including public art and historical monuments; musical and dramatic performances; other forms of creative art; historical maps; political cartoons; translations and other books; law and political thought; scholarly works. The digital museum will have images, a map component, and metadata.

For this purpose classical antiquity is broadly conceived so as to embrace any engagement, however indirect, with Greco-Roman and related cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. We’ll move beyond expressions of power on the part of the colonial or apartheid state: in particular, Greco-Roman mythology has provided means of resistance against the establishment. Our multimedia collection will make it possible to address the question: What is at stake in the presence of ancient Greece and Rome in a postcolonial context such as South Africa?

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement a digital museum using one of the various packages available for online curation and display

• Work closely with Prof. Parker and CESTA staff

Requirements:

• Ability to undertake independent research

• Strong communication skills

Preferred:

• Familiarity with web design and coding, particularly Drupal or other web languages

• Interest in museum work, library sciences, digital curation, classical antiquity, and/or South African history and culture

The Literary Lab

Project Lead: Prof. Mark Algee-Hewitt (English)

The Stanford Literary Lab uses quantitative and computational methods to ask and answer questions about texts. From tracking the historical rise and fall of iambic pentameter to training a neural net to identify suspenseful passages in novels, the Lab pursues hypotheses about literary history and form on the scale of hundreds or thousands of texts, exploring fiction and poetry through methods such as network analysis, stylometry, and topic modeling.

During winter quarter, the Lab will hire one RA to work on some combination of its ongoing projects. Depending on the student’s interests and skills, these projects may include a study of the literary canon as constructed in the Norton anthology series; an exploration of the role of genre in fan fiction; an analysis of racial and ethnic terms in American fiction from the 18th to the 20th century; and/or a large-scale experiment aimed at identifying the influence of author identity on readers’ perception of aesthetic merit and beauty.

Responsibilities:

• Dependent on the project to which the student is assigned. May include:

  • Digitizing documents

  • Maintaining a database of metadata on authors and texts

  • Building networks of character interactions

  • Manually tagging texts for character, setting, or time frame

  • Working with project leads to design an experimental protocol

Requirements:

• Attention to detail

• Strong communication skills

• Passion for literature

Preferred:

• Experience working with spreadsheets and updating databases

• Familiarity with Python and/or R

Mapping Ottoman Greece: Space, Power and Empire

Project Leads: Dr. Ali Yaycioglu (Stanford University, Department of History); Dr. Antonis Hadjikyriacou (Bogazici University, Istanbul)

Project Description:

This project aims to map the political and economic landscape of Greece during the Ottoman period, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More specifically, the main purpose of the project is to construct a GIS based digital and interactive map of Ottoman Greece and to designate urban and village settlements, agricultural and pastoral landscapes, transportation webs and monuments, mercantile and intellectual networks, the structure of governance and administrative setting, and accumulation of power and wealth in Western and Central Greece, roughly from the early 18th to mid 19th centuries. In doing so, we integrate complex and multifaceted data gathered from archival documents in Ottoman-Turkish and Greek (as well as French, Russian, and English), topographic data derived from our field trips and geo-historical sources, and historical maps and other visual material. The project is housed in CESTA’s Spatial History Project. We will collaborate with a group of scholars from Greek and Turkish institutions to classify the data and build a geospatial database.

The project has multiple but largely overlapping stages:

1. Geo-referencing historical maps and documents to designate historical place names in Turkish, Greek, Albanian, and Bulgarian. This will essentially allow us to start building a gazetteer.

2. Entering data on the digital map and from the classified and already processed archival sources. This will allow us to reconstruct communication and correspondence processes.

1. Various administrative letters

2. Petitions

3. Contracts

4. Imperial orders

5. Private letters

6. Cadastral documents

7. Fiscal documents

3. Placing communities, demographic information, religious and ethnic distribution.

4. Placing borders, administrative and agricultural units, infrastructure roads, bridges, and monuments.

5. Placing merchant networks, seasonal fairs, pastoral communities, intellectual networks such as scholars, monks, Sufis, and travellers.

6. Analysis

Responsibilities:

• Implement storyboards and layouts for the digital map

• Create digital visualizations

• Enter data from archival sources

• Geo-reference historical maps and documents

Requirements:

• Experience with programming and web development

• Basic knowledge of GIS

Preferred:

• Proficiency in CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and/or Flash/ActionScript

• Experience with design and data visualization

• Language skills: Greek, Turkish, and/or Arabic

• Interest in historical-spatial themes, Ottoman history, and Greece in Eastern Mediterranean context

 

Manuscript Networks of the Ragusan Republic (1358-1808)

Project Lead: Prof. Ivan Lupić (English)

This project aims to make digitally available a multilingual archive of manuscript documents from the Ragusan Republic (1358-1808; modern-day Dubrovnik, Croatia). The Ragusan manuscript tradition directly informed and continuously sustained the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of this city-state over several centuries and, from the fifteenth century onward, alongside the technology of print. The role of manuscripts in Ragusan culture is especially worthy of study because the City of Dubrovnik, the administrative center of the Republic, did not allow a printing press inside its walls until the late eighteenth century. As a result, the medium of manuscript remained central for centuries after the invention of print technology, serving as the means by which the small and thriving trading community kept abreast of global political events and cultural developments while also producing its own distinct literary culture. Chief tasks during this first phase of the project include the following: 1) define document description parameters; 2) develop initial software solutions; and 3) digitize a set of fifty literary and historical manuscripts to be included in the first version of the database.

Responsibilities:

• Assist in the curation, organization, and transformation of metadata describing the Ragusan manuscripts

• Work with the Bibliopedia platform for digitizing and organizing archives

Requirements:

• Experience working with spreadsheets and web forms

• Attention to detail

• Excellent written and spoken communication skills

• General technical literacy

Preferred:

• Drupal/PHP development experience

• Interest in manuscript culture and manuscript description

Kindred London

Project Lead: Prof. Nicholas Jenkins (English)

Kindred Britain takes one of the oldest forms of social network analysis, family relationships, and reimagines it for the contemporary medium of the Web. When Kindred Britain 1.0 (http://kindred.stanford.edu/#) launched in September 2013, Fast Company wrote that the interactive website was “a compelling example of the way the ‘digital’ in the term ‘digital humanities’ can create a completely new sub-discipline that was almost unable to be studied without the aid of computerization.”

For the upcoming Kindred Britain 2.0, we are creating a new feature, Kindred London, focussed on Britain’s capital city in the period between 1700 and 1950. Using digitized versions of three spectacular historic London maps and harmonizing them with current visualization techniques, we will be creating an innovatively immersive experience of a vanished London. In brief, think Google Maps for the Victorian world. By creating as provocative, information-rich and aesthetically compelling a site as we can, our goal is not to provide answers but to stimulate users to ask their own new questions.

Responsibilities:

• Research and digitize information about London neighborhoods

• Create a digital road network of the city

Requirements:

• Strong commitment to and interest in the project

• Excellent communication skills

• Creative thinking skills

• Ability to work independently and with project leads and fellow research assistants

Preferred:

• Background in ArcGIS

• Interest in urban studies and/or the history of London

Undocumented Mexican Migration

Project Lead: Prof. Ana Minian (History, CCSRE)

This project will examine the late-twentieth-century history of illegal border crossing, Mexican migrant communities, and bi-national efforts to regulate the border. Employing a transnational lens, this project investigates how Mexican migrants, Chicana/o organizations, nativist lobbies, and U.S. and Mexican officials reshaped national belonging during a critical period in North American history. That era, framed by the Bracero Program’s conclusion in 1965 and the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986, saw an unprecedented surge in circular, undocumented migration and key shifts in government responses. At the outset, this project argues, Mexican officials discouraged emigration, but by the 1970s, those same officials were encouraging such departures as a solution to high unemployment and population growth. Simultaneously, the U.S. government attempted to address these same problems by militarizing the border more aggressively. Thousands of Mexican nationals found themselves without the substantive right to belong to either nation-state.  In the context of those policies, migrants affirmed their own cartographies of belonging. Many young men living in the United States formed Mexican hometown associations that sent money across the border, making themselves central players in regional and national politics. For their part, elderly Mexican men, along with women and queer men, commonly responded to dominant gender and sexual ideologies by remaining in Mexico and depending on foreign remittances to survive

Responsibilities:

• Data entry

• Create digital maps

• Analyze primary sources

Requirements:

• Ability to work independently

• Ability to bring new ideas to the project

• Spanish language proficiency

Preferred:

• GIS and Google Maps proficiency

• Archival research experience

Beyond Borders: Mapping Early Modern Regimes of Movement

Project Lead: Dr. Luca Scholz (History)

Aiming to provide alternatives to conventional representations of early modern states as bounded territories, this project devises ways to visualize early modern political orders as regimes of movement. By applying GIS to the history of free movement and its restriction, it uses spatial analysis to historicize one of the most controversial issues of our day.

The student will work together with Luca Scholz in identifying, processing and visualizing the data necessary for producing such maps. In a first step, we will augment an existing corpus of historical maps and prints as well as more recent, edited sources. The initial focus is on Europe, especially the fragmented German-speaking lands at its heart, but a broader spatial framework may be envisaged as the project evolves. We will then use the collected material to extract, analyze and visualize data in ways that allow to understand space not in absolute terms, but taking into account the experience of mobile populations and their actual possibilities of using it at different times and under different conditions. This job provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the use of visual sources and the practice of digital spatial history in a flexible and creative way.

Resonsibilities:

• Digitize archival maps and prints

• Curate, organize, and transform metadata on archival sources

• Extract, analyze, and visualize geospatial data on population movements

Requirements:

• Experience with GIS

• Creative thinking skills

Preferred:

• Experience with design and data visualization

• Interest in spatial history

• Language skills in German, Italian, or Latin