Announcements

Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunities at CESTA

Still looking for a summer job? CESTA has you covered with a range of full-time and part-time positions!

(This application period has passed and is now closed)

Paid Undergraduate Research Opportunities in CESTA: Summer 2017

About CESTA

CESTA: Humanities Transformed

CESTA seeks to hire full-time or part-time undergraduate research assistants for a variety of projects this summer. Student tasks range from conducting traditional historical or archival research to learning new tools, developing interactive websites, creating databases and much more.

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is a premier research Center in the Digital Humanities. The Center is an open and collaborative work environment where faculty, graduate students, and postdocs from Stanford and around the world work on projects that bring together paradigms from history, geography, literary studies, education, media and cultural studies. CESTA is invested in understanding how the human experience has been recorded over time, mapping and visualizing societies over time, understanding contemporary digital environments, and through this work providing training for students and scholars. For more information on CESTA’s projects and labs please visit cesta.stanford.edu.

 

To Apply

If you are interested in working at CESTA, please fill out our application form no later than 12:00 PM on Tuesday, May 23. The application asks questions about your availability, experience, and interests; it also asks for a resume and cover letter. Please read the attached project descriptions and write a brief cover letter indicating why you might be a good fit for one or more of them. 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, as will applicants who are eligible for Federal Work Study or open to receiving independent study credit. Any applications submitted after the deadline will be considered only if the need arises.

 

Compensation

Over the summer, Research Assistants are supported through stipends, hourly positions, or Federal Work Study. Summer RAs who are funded through a stipend will receive a one time payment of $7000 for working full time (40 hours per week) or $3500 for working half time (20 hours per week). Depending on project and funding availability, some students may also work on an hourly basis at a rate of $16/hour. Students will have access to faculty and staff mentorship for their projects in addition to a great working space.

If you are not placed on a project this quarter, do not be discouraged to re-apply for next fall! We have over 30 rotating projects with new projects being added every quarter. In addition, project positions open up from quarter to quarter based on student availability.

Thank you for your interest; we look forward to meeting you. We encourage you to 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 Celena Allen (celena.allen [at] gmail.com) and Hannah Walser (walser [at] stanford.edu (walser[at]stanford[dot]edu)).

 

Application Deadline and Timeline

 

Tuesday, May 23 - DUE BY 12pm : Application due

Friday, May 26 : Interview invitations sent out to select candidates

Week of May 29 : Interviews begin

Week of June 5 : Offer letters start to be sent out

 

Project Descriptions

Titles/Keywords:

  1. Mapping Ottoman Greece (Ali Yaycioglu). Keywords: empire, GIS, Eastern Mediterranean, Greek/Ottoman Turkish/Arabic language skills

  2. Imagined San Francisco (Ocean Howell). Keywords: urban planning, infrastructure, architecture, GIS, interface design

  3. Chinese Railroad Workers in North America (Gordon Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin). Keywords: immigration, Chinese-American history, labor practices, oral history, mapping

  4. Law and Resistance in Late Medieval Europe (Rowan Dorin). Keywords: history, GIS, religious studies, legislation, Latin reading skills

  5. Unequal by Design: School Districting and the Roots of Educational Inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1950 (Matt Kelly). Keywords: education, public policy, equity, GIS, STATA

  6. Kindred London (Nicholas Jenkins). Keywords: urban planning, GIS, photography, British history

  7. Deathscape China: Grave Relocation in the People’s Republic (Tom Mullaney). Keywords: Chinese history, urban development, mapping, HTML

  8. CESTA Communications (Celena Allen). Keywords: social media, event planning, audio/video editing, Photoshop

  9. Land Talk (Deborah Gordon). Keywords: geospatial imaging, multimedia interviews, Excel, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

  10. Global Urbanization and Its Discontents: Poverty, Property, and the City (Zephyr Frank). Keywords: property, rent, poverty, urban studies

 

Mapping Ottoman Greece: Space, Power and Empire

Lead Researchers: Prof. 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. The first few stages the project will focus on over the summer is related to digitized historical materials. This may include, but is not limited to:

1. Digitizing/translating historical texts in Ottoman Turkish and/or Greek.

2. Doing investigative research on historical placenames to be included in a gazeteer of places.

3. Early stage planning and investigation into the concepts of borders, space, and place within the contexts of the various forms of rich historical material.

4. Geo-referencing historical maps and documents to designate historical place names in Turkish, Greek, Albanian, and Bulgarian.

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

Job Description: The student will work closely with the research team in CESTA led by professors Ali Yaycioglu (History, Stanford) and Antonis Hadjikyriacou (Bogazici University). Student work on this project will depend on the interests and skills.  

Preferred Skills:

Language skills in Greek or Turkish or Arabic are desirable but not necessary. Basic knowledge of GIS. Desire to work on historical-spatial themes with a group of scholars from Greece and Turkey, Interest in History, Ottoman History and Greece in Eastern Mediterranean context.

 

Imagined San Francisco

Lead Researcher: Prof. Ocean Howell (History and Architectural History, University of Oregon)

Project Description: American urban historians have begun to understand that digital mapping provides a potentially powerful tool to describe political power.  A new project called "Imagined San Francisco" is motivated by a desire to expand upon this approach. The site will enable users to layer a series of historical urban plans, with a special emphasis on unrealized plans. Visitors will be able to see what the city would have looked like had a variety of different schemes been enacted. The idea is to treat visual material not only to illustrate outcomes, but also to interrogate historical processes, and to use maps, plans, drawings, and photographs not only to show what did happen, but also what might have happened.  "Imagined San Francisco" presents the city not only as a series of material changes, but also as a contingent process and a battleground for political power.  These digital tools are uniquely suited to convey how political power was not only contested, but also distributed (if unevenly), since physical outcomes of the city were almost always hybrids of competing plans, rather than the straightforward expressions of the needs and desires of political regimes.

Job Description: The student will work closely with Prof. Ocean Howell and with Erik Steiner (Creative Director, Spatial History Project) on the implementation of storyboards and layouts and on the creation of digital visualizations.

Preferred Skills: Experience with programming and web-development, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and possibly Flash/ActionScript. Basic knowledge of GIS. Some experience with design and data visualization is a plus. Interest in urban studies, infrastructure, neighborhood planning, and/or San Francisco history is desirable.

 

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America at Stanford

Lead Researchers: Prof. Gordon Chang (History) and Prof. Shelley Fisher-Fishkin (English)

Project Description: Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s first Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West. The Project coordinates research in North America and Asia in order to create an online digital archive available to all, along with books, digital visualizations, conferences and public events.

The history of the Chinese in the U.S. from the nineteenth to early twentieth century is a transnational story that should be told from both U.S. and Chinese perspectives. The possibilities that the digitization of archives opens up will allow us to explore a range of issues involving the Chinese in America from both U.S. and Chinese vantage points. The Chinese Railroad Workers Project will produce a body of scholarship based on new materials and resources that will be the most authoritative study on the Chinese railroad worker experience in America. The scholarship will range from traditional books and essays to digital publications, along with the generation of a digital archival resource.  The student hired for this position will focus on the digital visualization component of the project, continuing the work done during the academic year.

Preferred Skills: This year we are looking for design and advanced programming skills. With special focus on html and interactive website development if possible. Students will work closely with the PIs, project manager, and other researchers to: create visualizations for the data both for public consumption as well as to aid in research and analysis.  The core student task will be helping to develop and design a web based visualization that will both tell the story of the Chinese Railroad Workers, and help visualize the experience of working on the rail line.

Project link: http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/

 

Law and Resistance in Late Medieval Europe

Project Lead: Prof. Rowan Dorin (History)

Prof. Dorin seeks an RA to assist with two digitization tasks relating to a larger project on law and resistance in late medieval Europe. Depending on hours and availability, the student may split his/her/their time across both projects or focus on one.

PROJECT 1:

This project aims to build a digital atlas of the Catholic Church's jurisdictional boundaries in the Middle Ages. The initial task involves georeferencing more than a hundred existing historical maps of varying quality and completeness and the “heads up” digitization of boundary features from those data sources. The resulting boundary information will then serve as a basis for generating the first-ever digital atlas of medieval Church jurisdictions, which will eventually be publicly available online.

Expected time commitment: flexible (but ideally at least 10/hours per week).

Preferred Skills: Either existing familiarity with ArcGIS (especially georeferencing of scanned images & polygon editing for heads-up digitization) or a willingness to learn!

PROJECT 2:

Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom promulgated legislation to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their jurisdictions. Until now, the extent and dispersion of the surviving sources has made impossible for scholars to explore systematically this corpus, despite its rich potential. Professor Rowan Dorin (History) is building a digital textual corpus of all such texts that survive from 1215-1400, the first stage in an international effort to explore the circulation, adaptation, and interpretation of local ecclesiastical legislation during the later Middle Ages. Current research tasks involve correcting and formatting Latin texts digitized from existing print editions.

Preferred Skills: A basic knowledge of Latin is highly desirable. Attention to detail is essential.

 

Unequal by Design: School Districting and the Roots of Educational Inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1950

Lead Researcher: Matt Kelly (Education)

Unequal by Design investigates the roots of educational inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1850 and 1950, examining how the spatial organization of opportunity in the region has shifted over time. We often treat resource disparities between school districts as unavoidable, if not natural, features of American schooling. Some scholars even celebrate it. Yet, inequality between school districts was a human invention, one that was shaped by a dense collection of poorly understood policy decisions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Job Description: Working with Matt Kelly, research assistants will digitize district-level data on school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area based on photographs of handwritten spreadsheets from the California State Archives. Next, they will create georeferenced GIS maps of school district boundaries in 1860, 1890, 1920, and 1950. The district boundary maps will be based on existing historical maps (scanned or photographed) for some dates and counties. For other dates and counties, students will need to manipulate district boundaries based on different maps and descriptions in written sources. If time allows, students will assist with spatial analysis and data visualization.

Preferred Skills: GIS; Data management in excel; interest in educational equity; interest in history; interest in design. Experience with STATA would be an added bonus but is not necessary.  

 

Kindred London

Lead Researcher: 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.

Students who are part of the Kindred London team will be working closely with Prof. Jenkins, the project’s PI, researching and digitizing information about London neighborhoods and creating a road network of the city.

We are looking for students with commitment to and interest in the project. Relevant skills include an ArcGIS background, as well as an interest in urban studies or the history of London. However, creativity, team spirit and diligence are the most important qualities of all.

You can explore Kindred Britain 1.0 at:

http://kindred.stanford.edu/#

or read about the project at:

Luke Dormehl, “Computer Science Enters The Bloodstream Of Academia With Incredible Projects Like This”, Fast Company,

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3018566/computer-science-enters-the-bloodstream-of-academia-with-incredible-projects-like-this

Corrie Goldman, “New Stanford Website Takes a Digital Approach to an Ancient Topic: Families”, Stanford Report,

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/kindred-britain-database-082613.html

 

Deathscape China: Grave Relocation in the People's Republic

Lead Researcher: Tom Mullaney

Project Description: Over the past three decades, the blistering pace of China’s economic development has transformed the country’s graveyards into sites of acute contestation. Confronted with some of the world’s highest population densities, and eager to bring new land under development, authorities and entrepreneurs have turned their eyes covetously upon once hallowed ground. Not unlike its better-known counterpart, the one-child policy, funeral reform (binzang gaige) has emerged as a controversial initiative crafted in response to China’s other population crisis – the growing population of the dead. Drawing upon findings from the Chinese Grave Relocation Digital Humanities Project at Stanford University, this paper charts out the history of grave relocation and its implications of our understanding of twentieth-century China. With the exhumation of at least ten million graves over the past decade alone, and the simultaneous promotion of cremation, the scale of Chinese funeral reform dwarfs in size and scope any known counterpart in history. The eviction of the dead has a long history in China, extending into the late imperial and Republican periods, and yet with the spectacular expulsion of corpses in recent years, a new era in our timeline has been inaugurated – a stunning example of which was the 2012 relocation of 2.5 million bodies in Zhoukou city in less than six months. It is no longer the disadvantageously located corpse alone that poses a problem to the living, but the materiality and presence of dead bodies per se.

Preferred Skills: GIS, design; HTML; interest in China; interest in learning cartodb; interest or experience in editing and publishing; programming desirable; Chinese language a plus but not necessary.

 

CESTA Communications

Lead: Celena Allen (CESTA Manager)

CESTA seeks a creative, motivated undergraduate to assist with communications and event planning at the Center. Home to six central labs and scores of projects, CESTA is Stanford’s digital humanities hub, regularly hosting events that bring together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from across campus and around the world. Through our social media feeds, email newsletter, and other public-facing content, CESTA keeps both scholars and the public informed about the timely and exciting digital humanities research happening at Stanford; we currently seek an undergraduate student to serve as web community manager for this diverse online presence.

Job Description: Depending on the Center’s needs and the student’s skills, tasks may include maintaining CESTA’s website, Twitter feed, and Facebook page; producing CESTA’s quarterly newsletter; editing and uploading video and audio content to CESTA’s YouTube channel; and ensuring that CESTA’s content and message are coordinated across multiple platforms. The student will work with a small team, on which he/she/they will be responsible for creating public-facing content and pushing it both to social media and to other RAs.

Preferred Skills: A friendly, outgoing personality and a flair for teamwork are essential, as is a genuine interest in and enthusiasm for CESTA’s programs and projects. Preference will be given to candidates with a background in marketing, advertising, or social media. Experience managing websites, organizing social media campaigns and using tools such as Hootsuite and Mailchimp is a bonus.

 

Land Talk

Lead Researcher: Prof. Deborah Gordon (Biology)

Job Description: We seek an earnest Stanford student to spend 5 hours per week building a prototype mobile application for collecting multimedia interviews and presenting them in their geographic context through an interactive map application.

Preferred Skills:

  • Demonstrable experience with HTML, CSS and (preferably) JavaScript

  • Microsoft Excel

  • Successful personal project management skills

Additional: Experience with JavaScript coding is desirable. Technologies to be used in the prototype will include XLSForms, Esri’s Survey123 and ArcGIS Online. Candidates should familiarize themselves with, and be prepared to articulate an understanding of, the basic features of XLSForms before interview. This position will be managed jointly by the Stanford Geospatial Center and CESTA and will provide students with the experience of working with teams producing cutting edge map-based research applications.

 

Global Urbanization and Its Discontents: Poverty, Property, and the City

Lead Researchers: Prof. Zephyr Frank (History); Erik Steiner (Creative Director, Spatial History Project)

Project Description: Over the last several decades, millions of people have migrated from rural villages and towns into urban contexts which now hold over half of the world’s population. The growth of cities also has been accompanied by an astonishing surge in land values and housing costs, especially in “superstar cities” whose real-estate markets have experienced an influx of global capital, driving housing prices upward and crowding out low-income residents. This exciting new project, which is part of a National Science Foundation-funded collaborative research initiative, investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of property, rent, and displacement in six world cities and their hinterlands in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Job Description: The RA for this project will work primarily with Zephyr Frank to develop and analyze data on rent, displacement, and eviction in Rio de Janeiro, Philadelphia, Belo Horizonte, and Denver.