Projects

Researchers on our projects include faculty, staff, and students from across the university.

Projects may be affiliated with one of CESTA's core labs or entirely self-standing; in either case, project lead(s) receive administrative, technical, and financial support from CESTA. Many are aided by the contributions of Undergraduate Research Interns. At times, these projects may last a set period of time and culminate in a piece of traditional or digital scholarship; in other cases, a project may develop a life of its own and continue even after the founder has moved on.

Aftermaths of Enslavement

How might we understand the experiences of enslavement at the Cape of Good Hope in the long 18th century, and what are its legacies?

Arabic Script OCR/HTR

The goal of this project is to identify and evaluate software approaches to the transcription of Arabic, Classical Arabic and Ottoman Turkish handwriting, and if necessary build/fine-tune an advanced model to transcribe pre-selected segments of…

Ars Mercatoria

Merchant textbooks were exchanged for centuries in Western Europe (especially Low Countries, France and Italy) and included various types of information, including, but not limited to, describing the ideal of the profession and their desired…

Breve

Breve is a tool for researchers who have to work with very incomplete and messy data.

CISTERN

CISTERN is building a database and a virtual research space that bring together geographic sources in Turkish, Arabic, and English.

Computational Border Studies

This project combines critical race and social justice theory with novel computational methods to study the urgent problem of bias within the U.S. court system.

Considering Disability in Online Cultural Experiences

This project considers ways in which online cultural experiences may be rendered more inclusive for Disabled people.

Corpus Synodalium

What did medieval canon law look like from the perspective of local communities?

DH Asia: Hot Metal Empire

Hot Metal Empire is a history of linotype, particularly in the non-Latin alphabetic world.

Early Cape Travelers

The early colonial Cape of Good Hope was subject to a large number of travel accounts by Europeans, roughly 1488 to 1900. For all the obvious ethnocentrism of their colonial gaze, they are historically valuable in that they contain unique…

Early Modern Mobility

What do the methods and patterns of transportation reveal about the early modern period?

Egypt in South Africa

Egypt has held an exceptional place in the western imagination.

EpicConnect

EpicConnect is an open-source, open access productivity platform.

Expanding the Discipline of English Language Arts

The goal of this project is to expand the way English Language Arts (ELA) is taught in U.S. high schools.

Fan Fiction

Since 1998, well over 6 million stories have been uploaded to FanFiction.net. This archive offers a unique source of data on prose writing.

Follow the Money Project

This project traces the spatial history of payments to local communities for federal lands. In 2014, the eleven states of the Far West received $2.695 billion dollars from federal land management agencies. Why?

Few Americans are aware of…

Free Speech, Regulation, and Democracy in the Digital Age

This project investigates IT blogs’ impact on public discussion of matters situated at the intersection of technology and society.

Geo-mapping African Studies at Stanford

Stanford has numerous faculty and students working in various African countries. These engagements take the form of fellowships, internships, study abroad trips, research trips, etc. We would love to build an interactive database, geomap, that…

George Moses Horton Project

An African American slave (1797–1888) challenged by laws that prevented him from learning to read and write, Horton developed a method of composing poetry orally.

Global Medieval Sourcebook

The Global Medieval Sourcebook presents medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations.

Global Urbanization and its Discontents

Over the last several decades, millions of people have migrated from rural villages and towns into urban contexts. Today, cities hold over half of the world’s population.

Grand Tour Project

In the eighteenth century, thousands of Northern Europeans traveled to Italy for a journey of cultural and symbolic capital they called the Grand Tour.

Human Rights-based Accountability Framework for Halting Government Hacking Abuses

The project "A human rights-based accountability framework for halting government hacking abuses" aims to look into contemporary public policy and industrial and technological tendencies that surround "government hacking" activities. This…

Imagined San Francisco

This project traces the history of urban planning in San Francisco, placing special emphasis on unrealized schemes.

Interactive Nolli Map Website of Rome

The goal of this project is to revitalize, preserve, and assure universal open access to the Interactive Nolli Map Website.

Josquin Research Project

The Josquin Research Project is an open-access tool for exploring Renaissance music.

Kindred Britain

Kindred Britain is a network of nearly 30,000 individuals — many of them iconic figures in British culture — connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation. It is a vision of the nation’s history as a giant family…

KSR (Know Systemic Racism)

Know Systemic Racism, a project led by Stanford's inaugural Racial Justice and Social Equity Librarian, Felicia Smith, is a data repository and data discovery environment unique in its focus on interconnections of discriminatory systems that…

Lacuna Stories

Lacuna Stories is a social and collaborative online platform for research, learning and teaching built around the concept of annotation.

Land Talk

LandTalk is a crowd-sourced collection of reports of changing landscapes from across the globe.

Life in Quarantine

Life in Quarantine (LiQ) is an online community platform that addresses the transformations we are experiencing in the age of COVID-19.

Literature of Social Distancing

Our project combines quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate social distancing and the novel of isolation.

Mapping Manuscripts

Our goal in the Mapping Manuscripts project is to map the production of medieval manuscripts through digital methods.

Mapping Ottoman Epirus

Mapping Ottoman Epirus seeks to better understand how the Ottoman Empire operated through big data, spatial and network analysis, visualization, and other digital methods.

Mapping Shared Sacred Sites

Despite the existence of numerous shared sites of religious observance across the world, they remain largely unknown.

Mapping the Cape Colony

Some 124 cadastral maps of the Cape Colony together give a uniquely detailed view of territory that would soon become the Union of South Africa. The maps are linked to the 1891 census.

Mapping the Musical Renaissance

The starting point of this project was a map documenting the life of the most famous Renaissance composer.

Mapping the Republic of Letters

The Mapping the Republic of Letters project showcases the scholarly networks of the Early Modern era.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Digital Project

The mission of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute is to preserve and promote the work and legacy of MLK. We are currently working on a unique project: making our archival holdings of MLK, one of the most iconic…

Medieval Networks of Memory

Medieval Networks of Memory aims to reveal a new and dynamic picture of thirteenth-century religious and social networks and community commemoration.

Modeling Representations of Otherness in Star Wars

This project leverages computational textual analysis to explore the background discourses of the human and the other in the extensive universe of the Star Wars novels.

Modernist Archives Publishing Project

The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishing history.

Oceanic Imaginaries

Ocean worlds make up more than 70% of our planet’s surface and tie together sprawling histories of empire, global capital, and migration. In an age of rising sea levels and heating ocean basins, the imperative to think with the maritime across…

OpenGulf

OpenGulf is a transdisciplinary, multi-institutional research group analyzing historical texts produced in the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq.

Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP)

OHTAP is developing an original methodology for data mining the rich but untapped collections of digitized transcripts of women’s oral histories.

Ottoman Fiscal Codex

The "Ottoman Fiscal Codex" project is an ambitious research initiative exploring the complex financial and political networks of the Ottoman Empire between 1750 and 1850, through the detailed analysis of the fiscal codex MAD 9726. Our work…

Palladio

Palladio is a visualization platform with an emphasis on data refining and linking.

Panic and Pandemic

This project examines discourses on epidemic disease against the history of outbreaks in early modern Europe, with case studies on Germany, England, and France.

Personhood Project

The project on Personhood seeks to understand how texts assign the qualities that we typically associate with persons to characters depicted within the text, whether human, object or animal.

Playing with Time: Great Perfection History in VR

This project is part of Elaine Lai’s PhD dissertation in Buddhism which is about how time functions in Buddhist literature. This VR project aims to trace the teacher-student relationships for three different transmission streams of the…

Pobladores Project

Tracing the life histories of early California settlers

This project traces the life histories of early California settlers from their origins in Mexico and elsewhere to their final days in California.

Poetic Thinking

Committed to equality, inclusion, and respect for all, Poetic Thinking creates a space for users to share and discuss academic and artistic work.

Quantifying Ancient Associations

“Quantifying Ancient Associations” project builds a historical database of ancient associations from the sixth century BCE to the fifth century CE. The historical data for this project come primarily from the Inventory of the Ancient Associations…

Railroaded Project

An interactive collection of over 2,000 footnotes to Richard White’s book on the transcontinental railroads.

Books have historically been constrained by the limitations of print medium, and even digital books are usually just…

Reimagining Royal Space: The Qilij Arslan II Kiosk in Konya as a Case Study for the Digital Reconstruction of Islamic Architecture

The Qilij Arslan II Kiosk before the collapse of the upper structure. Photograph possibly by Garabed Solakian, c. 1890.