Undergraduate Research Programs

In the 21st century, language death and digital exclusion have become linked in a mutually reinforcing cycle of marginalization and extinction. The gap that separates the top 100 languages from Digitally Disadvantaged Languages (DDLs) is steadily becoming a chasm, and the ramifications of this widening divide are profound. 6000-plus DDLs confront an existential crisis, predominantly among minority and indigenous communities: either we change business as usual, or language death will resolve the problem on its own. SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media) is committed to making all DDLs usable in digital environments. Our initiative is unique in seeking to combine human-centered approaches with technological innovation to change the current trajectory of language inclusion. SILICON is now in year two of its existence, having launched a successful internship and practitioners program to help advance Digitally Disadvantaged Languages worldwide. Key milestones in 2024-25 will be to (a) scale up and accelerate the process of digital inclusion for at-risk and under-resourced languages and (b) intensify and deepen community outreach to ensure a digital age that addresses deeply felt community needs.

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 qualities, economic information including which goods could be found in which city (and at which rates), social and institutional information (e.g., what are the institutions and customs of trading in different places), and arithmetic and book-keeping skills. Historical scholarship has only scratched the surface of the rich and diverse information. The Ars Mercatoria Project builds on the catalog of merchants’ manuals of the same name, covering thousands of manuals over the time period 1470-1700. This project aims to sketch a better understanding of the knowledge that was deemed worth circulating -in print- by a professional community. The project’s intern will focus on tracking down the manuscripts catalogued in the Ars Mercatoria (which has already been digitized) to build up a version of the dataset that will allow for content analyses, and run preliminary analyses on the metadata available about the manuals (e.g., printing locations, authors, date, editors), including generating visualization to describe the dataset. The intern should have a taste for bibliographic work, and skills to work with large archival data and/or data visualization. Linguistic skills in (old) Dutch, Italian, French or German are a plus.

The "Charting the Ottoman Empire" 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 involves building a relational database to uncover intricate connections among actors, networks, and financial systems, utilizing unique Ottoman accounting techniques. This project not only aims to provide new insights into the economic history of the Ottoman Empire but also to refine digital humanities methodologies. As an intern, you will be deeply involved in various phases of this project, ranging from data preparation and analysis to database management and network analysis. Expectations include engaging in detailed manual data entry, categorizing and structuring unstructured data, assisting in building relational database tables, and contributions to the network analysis. You will also contribute to defining inter-table relationships and transforming research questions into SQL queries, a process that requires critical thinking and precision. Ideal candidates should have a strong interest in historical research, digital humanities, and data management, and be willing to engage with complex, multi-step research processes. This internship offers a unique opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking research and develop valuable skills in historical data analysis and digital research methodologies.

The Legacies of Enslavement project in collaboration with the Elim and Pniël museums of South Africa, our community partners, aims to help small museums that showcase the heritage of South African mission stations display their legacies of enslavement to wider audiences and through more accessible means. The museums we collaborated with had minimal online presence or digital media to bring attention to the rich history of these South African towns. We analyzed sources for a comprehensive introduction to South African history focusing on its colonial legacies and the conquest of the land by European powers that created a capitalist nation entrenched with settler interests that still pervade the country today. We also analyzed works on museums as agents for social change in order to begin building a framework for how our online tools can empower the local communities we’re working with and give a voice to the residents, and especially the curators. Using this information and the help of the museum curators we created StoryMaps as online tools that include a history of the towns as mission stations, insight into the community now, a gallery showcasing the museums’ contents, and samples from interviews we conducted with the curators. This project sought to enrich a preceding larger effort, the Museum of South African Museums, which is a tool that includes access points and information on museums all across South Africa. We hope this platform will serve as a template for other community museums in the future to facilitate the creation of more accessible platforms for other museums that have little or no government funding.

Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom promulgated provincial canons and diocesan statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful. Although scholars have long recognized the importance of these texts as sources for medieval social, legal, and religious history, their scale and dispersion have hindered efforts to study connections and variations across regions and over time. Corpus Synodalium is a new online resource that allows users to explore and compare more than 1600 of these texts using a variety of simple text analysis tools (including fuzzy and faceted searches, collocation, and time series). Users can also export search results to the first-ever digital atlas of medieval European dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces, in order to look for spatial patterns within the text corpus. The researchers will help with further website development, analysis, and trying to train a large language model (LLM) out of this full corpus.

This project will increase the accessibility of ancient languages through braille to students and scholars who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled. Through the integration of high-quality, dependable braille tables into the open-source and community supported LibLouis project, we will make sure that online text and digital editions can be accessed on the fly by refreshable braille displays. The project focuses on Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic, with special consideration to their representation in scholarly editions. We will also create and distribute educational resources geared toward braille readers who wish to learn and study these languages and instructors teaching them to blind students.

Stanford Text Technologies investigates all forms of human communication from 70,000 BCE to the present day to determine trends and characteristics of information systems. Several projects sit under or are allied with TexT. Medieval Networks of Memory reveals a new and dynamic picture of earlier thirteenth-century religious and social networks by describing, mapping, visualizing, and analyzing unique and culturally rich textual artefacts—the Mortuary Roll of Lucy of Hedingham, now kept at the British Library (MS Egerton 2849, parts I and II), and the Mortuary Roll of Amphelisa of Lillechurch, which belongs to St John’s College, Cambridge (MS N. 31). The project team has created an advanced database for an interactive map, behind which will be locational, descriptive, textual, and evaluative evidence. Originally published by Clarendon Press in 1957, this reimagined version now exists as an Open Access resource. The initiative transforms Ker’s foundational catalogue into an interactive and quantifiable digital database, offering researchers and students enhanced capabilities for exploring Early English manuscripts. Building on Ker’s original catalogue, this project enriches the data with additional layers of material, including biographical information on Ker, details of his extensive publications, previously unpublished archival sources, and insights from contemporary scholarship. By digitizing and expanding upon Ker’s work, the project allows for a broader and deeper understanding of the corpus of Early Engl manuscripts, positioning the catalogue as a central resource in medieval studies.

This project of the Stanford Center for Law and History—drawing on methods from the digital humanities, including text analysis of documented legal codes, practices and industry customs—will be the first stage of a broad and innovative legal and labor history of the American performing arts. Our immediate focus will direct resources towards the recovery, preservation, and visual online presentation of a vitally important archival collection recently recovered by the Dramatists Guild of America, the trade association of playwrights, librettists, composers, and lyricists. The Dramatists Guild collection, which extends over a century, reveals an expansive history of dramatic authorship in the United States. The visual online mapping of legal, artistic, social, and economic networks over time will be a feature of the research. A deeper understanding of diversity, inclusion, and access to the industry over the past one hundred years—through the lens of these theatrical networks—will also be a key goal of the project. The legal histories of remarkable women and artists of color engaged in dramatic authorship go largely untold, as do the legal histories of ordinary authors without dominant and enduring reputations. The project will aim to provide tools to show how underrepresented artists negotiated with stakeholders over time and how these negotiations framed their experiences as artists.

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 information, including natural history, ethnography and topography. Many of the key texts have been edited with commentary and translation by Historical Publications of South Africa (HiPSA), formerly known as the Van Riebeeck Society; others await high-quality new editions and translations. While the HiPSA volumes typically contain basic maps, the aim of our project is create high-quality digital maps for as many itineraries as possible. Our team has already developed a prototype on the basis of 1780s travelogues by Hendrik Swellengrebel and Francois le Vaillant, originally written in Dutch and French respectively. We are eager to expand our coverage. Once we have mapped a critical mass of these texts with ArcGIS, we will able to detect broader geographical patterns beyond any one journey, including the persistence of certain routes over time and divergences therefrom. Furthermore, a fuller cartography of the area will allow comparison with indigenous knowledge systems contained in naming practices, for which considerable toponymic data exists. In this project we'll use English translations of selected travel journals to map and ultimately aggregate their itineraries. Prior knowledge of ArcGIS, of Southern African history/archaeology, or of early modern travel writing would be an advantage but none is required.

The goal of this project is to expand the way English Language Arts (ELA) is taught in U.S. high schools. Many ELA teachers want to expand their practice to prepare students for the kinds of literary and language engagement they might encounter in college or in their everyday, out-of-school lives, but they need knowledge, resources, and authority to do so. We want to provide some of those things by doing a content analysis of hundreds of high school ELA course descriptions and comparing those with college English course descriptions, asking: 

• What subjects do those courses explore?
• What kinds of texts do they invite students to read?
• What kinds of skills do they demand?
• What kinds of products do they ask students to create?
• How do they represent the value of ELA? 

Undergraduate interns will join our team of faculty and grad students to use computational text analysis and data visualization tools to compare and represent the data in different ways. The Expanding ELA project is linked to the Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR) which is run out of the Stanford Literary Lab. If you’re interested in ELA, curricula, making high school better, and data visualization, this could be a great project for you.

Feminist Textual Materialities continues earlier work begun with CESTA interns to mine the records of leading twentieth-century novelist, Virginia Woolf, and her publishing house, The Hogarth Press (1917-1946), to uncover entirely new archival pathways to understanding her role as artist, publisher, and public intellectual. Having had students previously hand transcribe, and data visualize, Woolf's own book sales records from her Press's financial ledgers, I am now interested in finding out how AI might accelerate the process of unlocking the vast storehouse of cultural, financial, book historical and economic data in the entirety of the Press's sales records -- including all the books published, sold, and distributed around Britain and the globe that the Press published outside Woolfs' publications. There are tens of thousands of lines of handwritten data to be (ideally) automatically transcribed. This requires a suite of computational skills and an understanding of Gemini, including work currently being done by my current intern (who is documenting for transferability our process), but also students generally interested in proofing the automated transcriptions against original manuscripts, and in diving into how to data visualize their contents.

The Josquin Research Project (JRP) changes what it means to engage with Renaissance music. Our open-access website not only hosts an ever-growing collection of complete scores, but for the first time makes the music fully searchable: in a few clicks you can identify every instance of a given melodic and/or rhythmic pattern. The JRP also provides analytical tools that can be used to gain insight into individual works, the style of a given composer, or the musical lingua franca. The goal of the project is to facilitate a new kind of knowing that brings "big data" into conversation with traditional analytical methods. Our project moves outward from fundamental histories of music, musicians, and music-making dating back to the nineteenth century in order to uncover connections among seemingly unrelated people and events. We break down disciplinary walls by taking material that is usually separated into specialized subfields and assembling it in a single place. And we provide a space in which to evaluate these materials comparatively. In doing so we offer a new model for how we tell stories about the past. To accomplish these goals we are building a mapping tool for visualizing Renaissance culture. The map will be web-based and dynamic, allowing users to explore intersections between heterogeneous types of information while giving access to primary documents that underpin that information. Users will be able to explore freely with the aim of discovering serendipitous connections, or hone in on narrower questions by privileging parameters like the lives of central figures, the movements of courts, the copying of books, and the shifting of political borders. Our map will leverage the methods of the digital humanities and the tools of data visualization in order to facilitate a new, spatially centered historiography.

The Stanford Literary Lab is an interdisciplinary digital humanities research collective housed in the department of English. We produce projects primarily in the fields of computational literary studies and text-mining, using a wide range of methods, including NLP, network analysis, annotation, and statistical modeling. This year’s projects include offerings like the Literature Anthologies, Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR,) and the Dime Novels Project. We welcome interns with varying interests and expertise in the digital humanities--from bibliographic research to NLP. Lab interns can move between projects to get varied experience or specialize in one, at the discretion of the Lab directors.

• Literature Anthologies

  Anthologies are an essential structure for understanding canon and curriculum. Who gets anthologized, what pieces of their writing are selected, and how does that change over time? If you’re interested in critical bibliography, database structures, world literature, English literature, canons, or curricula, this is a great project for you! It does not require prior coding experience. This project is a collaboration between the Stanford Literary Lab and colleagues J.D Porter (Price Lab, University of Pennsylvania) and Erik Fredner (University of Richmond). 

• The Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR)

  The Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR) collects, archives, and produces research on college course descriptions. We welcome students with interest in webarchiving, webscraping, NLP, text-mining, databases, education datasets, and website design/production. We’re a large team with a lot of interests, including mapping how disciplines intersect, what authors and titles are assigned where, and how we talk about writing, math, and code in these course descriptions. This project is linked to the Expanding ELA project and is run out of the Stanford Literary Lab.

• Dime Novels

  This project aims to develop a meaningful automated method for segmenting scenes in fiction texts by initially annotating scenes in Harlequin novels manually and then using these annotations to train language models. As part of a multilingual collaboration, the project will analyze scene segmentation in German translations of Harlequin novels, examining how the segments align with the original English versions and noting differences such as shortening or lengthening. A key focus will be comparing these translations with the US originals during a workshop at Stanford in February 2025. We seek CESTA research interns to help annotate Harlequin novels (approximately three hours per novel) to enhance our training data for an automated segmentation model in English. Interns will receive a crash course on annotation in literary studies, digital annotation using CATMA software, and insights into language model fine-tuning and international collaborations in computational literary studies.

This project explores the physical and human geography of 1960s Cuba through the lens of extreme climate events, specifically droughts and hurricanes, to examine their lasting impact on landscapes, communities, and the economy. Drawing on historical climate data, archival maps, and contemporary visualizations, we aim to reveal the geographic patterns and consequences of these phenomena on Cuba's agricultural and urban centers. By focusing on the 1960s—a pivotal decade for Cuba’s sociopolitical transformations—this project will overlay climatic data with social and economic shifts to better understand how Cuba’s landscapes and communities adapted to and were shaped by these challenges. Our research will consider the following questions: How did recurring droughts and hurricanes influence urban planning and agricultural distribution in this era? To what extent did these climate events exacerbate or reveal vulnerabilities in infrastructure and rural communities? Through what strategies did communities and the government respond to or prepare for these impacts? This study builds on prior CESTA-supported projects and collaborates with meteorological archives to triangulate historical weather events with landscape and socioeconomic transformations. The next phase will integrate climate impact data with population studies to assess how specific regions were affected over time, especially rural agricultural areas dependent on rainfall or coastal regions vulnerable to hurricanes. Our target audience includes environmental historians and geographers, with a vision of expanding our findings into accessible resources for educators, conservationists, and policymakers focused on climate resilience and adaptation in the Caribbean.

Today, the New York City metro area is home to over 31,000 Latinx-owned businesses—more than ever before. However, Latinx entrepreneurship in the city has deep roots. Mapping Nueva York explores this rich history, highlighting a pivotal transformation in Latinx New York that began over a century ago. Starting in 1898, as the city saw an influx of Spanish-speaking migrants from regions it helped destabilize, these businesses grew into more than just commercial spaces; they formed the visual and material foundation of a shared sense of belonging and identity. Spread throughout New York’s colonias, these establishments reflected common experiences, culinary traditions, cultural rituals, and social bonds, serving as crucial anchors for an emerging Latinx collective. By using business directories from 1934 and 1964, this project seeks to create a digital platform that engages audiences with this often-overlooked history, preserving the role of commerce in shaping Latinx place and identity at key moments in the twentieth century.

Despite the existence of numerous shared sites of religious observance across the world, they remain largely unknown. Shared sacred sites are “holy” for members of multiple religious groups (which may also be ethnically or nationally distinct) and serve not only as places where people come together to respect the site in various ways, but also as sites where they are forced, by their coexistence, to mediate and negotiate their diversity and differences. This ethos of sharing has been customary throughout the world and throughout history. This project proposes to restore accounts of cohabitation, hospitality, and tolerance to the historical record, taking their place alongside the better-known examples of communal strife and interreligious antagonism.

During the Winter, the intern will explore methods to analyze collections data and create engaging representations. One of these will be an interactive map that spatially visualizes the geographic distribution of SUAC collections. This map will be the first of its kind since a full inventory of the collections was completed. In the Spring, the focus will shift towards developing digital interactive components for SUAC’s upcoming exhibition, scheduled to open at the end of the quarter. The intern’s work will be displayed on a touchscreen kiosk in the exhibition, enhancing visitors’ experience with interactive elements. This internship provides an opportunity to gain experience in museum data visualization and the development of interactive exhibition components.

In the middle of the ninth century an Iraq-based bishop named Thomas of Marga wrote what may be the world’s longest alumni newsletter. That is, Thomas wanted to narrate the miraculous deeds of everyone connected to his home monastery. The resulting Book of Governors contains 622 different characters and is nothing short of a sprawling mess. Its tales jump from abbots to teleporting trees, caliphs to petrified dragons, bishops to a temporarily resurrected dog and often defy a linear read. But this messiness makes Thomas’s writings particularly amenable to digital analysis. Previous interns have worked on and become co-authors of articles and academic presentations regarding the character networks of this set of medieval saint tales written by Christians living under early Islam. This summer's intern will build on preliminary work our team has done regarding the geography of Thomas's narrative. They will consolidate a list of toponymns, georeference them, and produce digital maps and GIS data visualizations with the goal of journal publication. The ideal candidate will have previous GIS experience. Reading knowledge of French not required but a plus.

The mission of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute is 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 individuals of the 20th century, accessible online to a 21st century public. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. project began in 1985, It is a comprehensive collection of King's most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writings, and unpublished manuscripts. Seven volumes (documented 1929 to 1962) have been published with some content available online and the 8th is in the works. Each volume contains approximately 180 documents. They have become essential reference works for researchers and have influenced scholarship about King and the movements he inspired. However, these large books are pricey and not accessible to all. We intend to build a searchable database and accompanying website that would enable scholars and the public to access, analyze, and learn from the published and unpublished works, writings, and wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.

MAPP or The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (modernistarchives.com) is a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishing history. With rich metadata, the site displays, curates, and describes the often invisible or overlooked material documents that contribute to public understanding of the “life cycle” of a book, its production, reception and distribution. MAPP also uncovers the unheralded industry actors—editors, illustrators, reviewers, printers—who bring works into the public eye. Our collection contains thousands of images from archives and special collections relating primarily to Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press—letters, dust jackets, financial records, paper samples, illustrations, sketches, production sheets, and other “ephemera”—but we are actively expanding into other presses, with the long term goal of building the infrastructure currently lacking in book historical studies to engage a comprehensive comparative landscape of 20th-century book publishing. We are a multi-layered networked digital archive: for instance, newly digitized materials are presented with peer-reviewed summaries, biographies, bibliographical information, and other scholarly materials. A major project within MAPP on booksellers and bookselling in interwar Britain, including the global circulation of modernist literature, includes a a large-scale transcription and data analysis project detailing all sales and purchasing records of the Hogarth Press. This work marks the first comprehensive quantitative and cultural historical project on the totality of a press’s sales history in modernist studies. CESTA research assistants have been pivotal to the transcription, analysis, and data visualizations of these rare historical documents over the past five years and continue to facilitate otherwise impossible to pursue research.

Ocean worlds make up more than 70% of our planet’s surface and tie together sprawling histories of migration, global capital, and environmental change. In an age of rising sea levels and rapidly heating ocean basins, the imperative to think expansively with the ocean across disciplines, mediums, historical periods, and geographical regions is more urgent than ever. Serving as a creative commons for a wide range of specialist ocean projects currently underway at Stanford, Oceanic Imaginaries spotlights both the rigorous specificities and the transdisciplinary scopes of ocean research through interactive ocean maps, curated bibliographies, and open-access resources.

OpenGulf (opengulf.github.io) is a transdisciplinary, multiinstitutional research group analyzing historical texts produced in the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq from the early nineteenth century to the present. The various projects associated with OpenGulf publish open historical datasets, corpora and digital exhibitions with the aim of opening the field of Gulf Studies to digital historical exploration, analysis and interpretation in the service of open research and pedagogy. Currently, OpenGulf includes six projects with students, faculty and staff at eight institutions actively contributing content including analysis of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and English texts, interdisciplinary analysis of multilingual restaurant menus in the Persian Gulf, and close and distant readings of an expansive British gazetteer of the region that includes mapping over 20,000 unique named locations. During the 2023-34 academic year, CESTA interns will focus on the Historical Texts as Data project of OpenGulf, which follows a general three-step workflow: preparing historical texts in various media formats and languages for digital analysis; extracting and annotating names of people and places in those texts to create reusable structured data; and creating and publishing visualizations and narratives derived from those datasets. Depending on language ability, CESTA interns may also contribute to transcriptions of handwritten Ottoman-era Arabic texts to training data for a handwritten text recognition model using the Transkribus platform. Students with language abilities in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, French or German are particularly encouraged to apply, although such abilities are not a prerequisite for work on the project.

The Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP) has developed an original methodology for data mining the rich but untapped collections of digitized transcripts of women’s oral histories housed in university libraries and other collections across the United States. OHTAP has created a database of 2500 transcripts from diverse regions and groups and developed a subcorpus extraction tool called Winnow. The current study asks whether and how the interviewed women named, remembered, and interpreted forms of sexual violence. Our project combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand which women spoke about sexual violence; what language narrators used to describe assault, abuse, and harassment; how responses to violence changed over time and across groups; and what historical contexts enabled resistance and activism concerning sexual violence. We seek a student intern to support further data analysis of our results, to explore our data for new topics, and to help manage our data set. A background in data science, history, qualitative encoding, data cleaning, or R programming language would be useful.

The remains of the royal kiosk atop one of the northern towers of the wall around the citadel in Konya was one the few medieval Islamic palatial structures from the wider Iranian world to survive into the age of photography. The building was photographed extensively in the late 19th century, and throughout the 20th, with the pre-1907 images being the most valuable, as they show details of the now lost upper structure. This project aims to reimagine and reconstruct the original appearance of the kiosk, and a newly excavated structure to its west, using a combination of methodological and evidentiary approaches. The research is based on the close study of the earliest recorded drawings and photographs of the building, alongside the extant material remains in museums across the world, as well as the in-situ structural elements.

Understanding imprecise space and time in narratives through qualitative representations, reasoning, and visualization is an international collaboration with the aim to produce new tools, datasets, and knowledge about the way humans understand and represent their place in space and time through narratives. Because narratives are complex, it is necessary to develop new tools and ontologies for identifying the rich spatial and temporal settings for what we call sense of place. The project seeks to go beyond conventional methods for extracting place names and geonouns in order to understand these features relationally and, where possible, comparatively in the context of large text corpora—specifically, a corpus of Lake District travel writing and a corpus of Holocaust testimonies. Finally, the project works with external partners in the museum and cultural heritage spheres in order to bring these tools and concepts to a broader public.

Throughout much of pre-modernity, the most geographically expansive church was not the Roman Catholic Church or the Byzantine Orthodox Church, but rather churches which reached from modern-day Turkey, throughout the Middle East, across Afghanistan, down to India, up to Tibet, and into China. For these churches the primary language of Christian scholarship and liturgy was the lingua franca of the late ancient Middle East, a dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. Yet a focus on more western branches of Christianity has meant that Syriac Christians have essentially been written out of history. Today, about ten million modern Christians trace their lineage back to the Syriac churches of old. Until recently most of them remained in the lands of their tradition’s birth: modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and eastern Turkey. During the First World War a genocide targeted Syriac Christians in the Ottoman Empire, killing between 250,000-500,000 of them. This was followed by periods of discrimination and persecution in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The twenty-first century is not looking much better. The chaos following the second Iraq war decimated the Syriac churches in Iraq and led to massive emigration and dislocation. The civil war in Syria has been even more destructive to these communities and their patrimony. Their congregations have been targeted by Islamists, their churches have been destroyed by the Islamic State movement, and their leaders have been kidnapped and killed. But those interested in reclaiming the history of Syriac Christianity keep running into the same problem. For professors, students, and for modern heritage communities there are minimal pedagogical resources for teaching or learning this endangered language. For example, although there are a few textbooks on first year Syriac, there isn’t a single textbook for intermediate or advanced study. Over the last two years CESTA interns have been changing that. One of the greatest challenges in learning Syriac is vocabulary acquisition. Based on research in language pedagogy, our team has moved toward gamification as an effective means to acquire and drill the Syriac language. To help with this effort, this summer an intern will have two principal tasks: 1) To explore a number of games currently used for vocabulary building: both for children improving their native fluency and for adult learners of foreign languages. These will serve as models for similar endeavors in Syriac. 2) They will then code several similar games tailored to Syriac learners. At the summer’s end these will be added to our team’s current Syriac verb tutorials (syriacverbtutorial.org) so that professors, heritage communities, and self-learners can begin using them in the fall term. As a result, the intern will have an immediate and lasting effect not just upon the scholarship of Syriac Christianity but also in the preservation of an under-resourced language and endangered communities. Applicants must have a good knowledge of Python and strong coding experience.

The Senegalese Slave Liberations Project builds on the Slave Voyages Database, which has transformed the study of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by presenting the most comprehensive collection of individual slave trade voyages and the most complete set of evidence of African ports of embarkation and American ports of disembarkation. The Slave Voyages Database, however, tells us virtually nothing about slavery and the slave trade within Africa. The Senegalese Slave Liberations Project provides a crucial counterpart to the Slave Voyages project in presenting evidence of slavery and the slave trade in the Senegambian, Mauritanian, and Malian region of West Africa during the second half of the 19th century. Specifically, registers of liberation have survived as records of enslaved people under French colonial authority who sought their freedom. The project team is working to provide unique identifications for each case of liberation, analyze the data, and develop visualizations to support academic research and innovative pedagogy. Of the 28,000 liberations registered for the years 1857-1904, the team has already analyzed over 17,000 cases. They are framing how to build an interactive website that would facilitate the use and exploration of data by researchers and students. The SLP team including interns have already published one article, two more in the pipeline --including a high school world history curriculum unit-- will be presenting new findings at an international conference in London, and working on new publication exploring the demographic profile of enslaved people seeking their liberation.

Where are the African female writers of the twentieth century? By highlighting the contribution of erased South African scholar-writer Regina Twala, this project addresses the critical issue of the invisibility of female authors within established canons of twentieth-century African literature, and it urgently seeks to remedy the extent to which women-authored bodies of work from this period continues to be lost, misplaced, forgotten, and ignored. An interdisciplinary team of historians, literary scholars, and archivists will create a critical digital archive displaying the key work of largely unknown 20th-century African female writers. The archive is aimed at scholars and the general public, especially emphasizing audiences on the African continent. Phase One of the project will digitize and curate the output of Regina Twala (1908-68), an important South African-Swazi politician and activist who wrote four manuscripts, none of which were published. We will offer valuable primary source material as a way of making Twala's legacy visible to both researchers and the general public.

A World Made by Travel (aworldmadebytravel.org) makes public an interactive database concerning the lives and journeys of 6,007 travelers, mostly British, who toured Italy in the course of the eighteenth century. The database contains more than half a million data points, such as, for example, data of places and dates for more than 27,000 visits to different destinations, or data for more than 20,000 mentions of other people in relation to the 6,007 travelers. All this data was laboriously retrieved from a printed source, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy, whose transformation into a digital research source is at the core of the Grand Tour Project. One of the most striking results of the datafication of this Dictionary has been the recovery of travelers who had been subsumed in others’ entries. A World Made by Travel contains more than a thousand new traveler entries, most of whom are for women: while in the Dictionary around 200 entries pertained to women, now we have 955. This number allows us to expand exponentially on previous studies on women and the Grand Tour, which at most have taken into consideration 15 to 20 travelers. This summer we will focus on these 955 women, interrogating in depth the data we already have about their lives and journeys but also searching for sources beyond the Dictionary. Out of the 6,007 travelers in the database more than 800 men are also represented also in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but only sixteen of the women are. Our work to enrich the data we have for the 955 women and to analyze its shape and characteristics will have an impact on how we understand mobility and women in a transnational eighteenth-century context. Some of the questions we will ask: Did women travel alone or with family? By what means? In what capacity? This research will also illustrate what is preserved and how about different people from the past.

What do research interns do?

Research interns are matched with ongoing research projects led by faculty and graduate students, where they use their existing skills and/or learn new skills in order to contribute to current research in the digital humanities. Our interns join a vibrant cohort of Stanford undergrads from many majors and backgrounds in a supportive program that includes discussions and workshops on topics related to the digital humanities, as well as participation in a capstone publication—the CESTA Research Anthology.

In their project work, research interns engage in various phases of the research process, including traditional and archival research, finding data, creating databases, using computational methods of modeling and analysis, data visualization, and contributing to various forms of publication. For example, depending on the project a student is working on, they may:

• Use GIS to quantify and map urban development over time
• Visit library or digital collections to find relevant materials about the lived experiences of Chinese railroad workers
• Build databases of European travelers to Italy in the 18th century
• Transcribe medieval documents containing information such as spells, early medicinal remedies, and evidence of pagan elements that have persisted throughout the centuries
• Develop interactive web platforms that allow users to visualize data sets

Though faculty develop the initial research questions and projects, students are active participants in research design and may contribute by challenging assumptions, suggesting alternative approaches, and posing new hypotheses.

To learn more about the kind of work research interns do, please explore our 2021 Research Anthology and view our brief Intern Spotlight videos on CESTA's YouTube channel: 

• Karunya Bhramasandra, a sophomore planning to major in English and minor in Global Studies, contributed to SOPES, a project within Text Technologies.
• Erick Enriquez, a sophomore majoring in Computer Science, worked on mapping conversations in LandTalk. 

• Michelle Julia Ng, a junior majoring in Computer Science + History, worked on the "Urbanization and its Discontents" team, part of the Spatial History Lab.

What kind of projects can I work on?

Our projects range from large multi-year, multi-faculty projects, with multiple interns, to more narrowly focused projects with a single faculty or graduate researcher and intern. All projects work with the CESTA team. Project openings vary as student availability and project status change. To learn more about ongoing projects, publications, events, and academic programs, explore our website at cesta.stanford.edu/projects-labs.

Projects committed to recruiting interns for the 2024 program will be listed above, however this list may grow as other projects determine their support needs. Notably, the Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship program will recruit a number of interns to work on graduate research projects in the Winter-Spring program.

What does the application process entail?

The application consists of a downloadable application form, a short statement of interest, and a resume, all of which are uploaded via our application portal. The downloadable application form will take less than an hour to complete and is intended to help us learn about your interests, availability, skills, and previous experience.

If you have previously interned at CESTA and would like to intern with us again, you are required to fill out a new application.

Information sessions held shortly after the application deadline will allow you to meet the CESTA team, see the CESTA workspace, and ask any questions about the program. They are also an opportunity for us to get to know you, so attendance is strongly encouraged.

What should my statement of interest include?

The statement of interest is an opportunity for you to tell us why you're interested in the program, what you hope to gain from it,  and what unique skills, interests or perspectives you will bring to our community. It should be 250-350 words long (approximately one typed page).

For students applying for the first time, we ask that you include:

• Why you’re interested in this internship program and what you hope to gain
• What you can offer to the program
• A previous challenge you faced and how you responded
• A summary of previous experience in research and/or collaborative tasks

For students who have interned with us before, we ask that you include:

• Why you’re interested in participating in this program again and what you hope to gain
• How this program helped you grow, develop, or learn
• A challenge you faced during your previous participation in the program and how you responded at the time, and (optionally) how you would respond now

What makes a strong statement of interest?

A thoughtful and well-written statement of interest is an important component of your application. Here are a few tips:

• Don’t summarize your resume. There is no harm in mentioning a particular accomplishment, but the majority of your statement should focus on explaining why you'd like to be part of this program and how you can contribute to our community.
• Show, don’t tell. Make use of examples to show who you are as a student, researcher, and community member. Instead of telling us that you’re an effective collaborator, for example, tell us about a time you collaborated on a project and what you learned from the experience.
• Follow instructions. We asked for a one-page response that covers specific points. Make sure that you submit a statement that meets those requirements, which might take a few drafts to get right! We recommend asking a peer, faculty member, or mentor to read through your statement before you submit it.

How does working for CESTA provide me with academic, research, and job experience?

While working on CESTA projects students gain valuable experience. Students have access to faculty, staff, and graduate student mentorship in addition to a great working space. CESTA provides a community and program that exposes students to relevant on campus tools, people, and resources. Students can gain experience working within their field or topic of interest, or gain experience outside of the realm of their major through project-based learning. Students also acquire new technical and conceptual skills. While working on these projects students are also practicing critical soft skills such as problem solving, communication, and time management.

What if I apply and am not hired?

Student demand for projects is high and there are limited positions available. However, students who are not immediately interviewed or placed on a project in the quarter in which they apply can be considered for additional projects as they become available.

With new projects being added every year, we also encourage students to re-apply in future, especially as particular interests and skills develop!