Welcome to CESTA

At CESTA, students and faculty combine the power of humanistic investigation with new technologies to document, analyze and understand the changing human experience.

2025 Summer Undergraduate Interns

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is pleased to welcome 17 Undergraduate Interns, a community of digital humanities researchers.

Reflections on the Digital Humanities

A Stanford Arcade and CESTA collaboration

Articles and interviews of digital humanities practicioners and professors at Stanford. Curated and edited by Charlotte Lindemann (Stanford PhD Alum).

2024 CESTA Research Anthology

The capstone for our interns is the submission of a research report under the supervision of their project leads. The Anthology brings together these reports, offering a student's-eye view on the work

Introducing our Taxonomy of DH Methods and Approaches

Read about a unique feature of our new publications page: a taxonomy of methods and approaches which can be used to filter our publications

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Featured Project

The Senegal Liberation Project, led by Professors Richard Roberts and Rachel Jean-Baptiste at Stanford, Babacar Fall and Ibrahima Seck in Senegal, and Rebecca Wall at Loyola Marymount University, together with Joshua Goodwin at Stanford and Erica Ivins at Columbia University, is investigating slavery and  freedom in  19th-century West Africa.

This is an exciting time for CESTA. The growing community that we’ve built over the past fifteen years is at the center of many fascinating new initiatives on campus. From the new Data Science degree in Artistic and Cultural Analysis, to emerging faculty projects and public partnerships, from the challenges and opportunities of AI models in the humanities, to the growth of maker culture, CESTA is at the nexus of all of these new ways of thinking about the humanities and the arts.
Mark Algee-Hewitt headshot
Mark Algee-Hewitt
Faculty Director

EVENTS

January
20
Date
Tuesday, January 20, 2026. 12:15pm - 1:15pm
Location
Building 160, Wallenberg Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
433A
January
28
Date
Wednesday, January 28, 2026. 5:30pm
Location
Building 160, Wallenberg Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
433A

NEWS & BLOGS

The Digital Humanities Research Scholars Program will run winter and spring 2026. Applications are open through Friday, January 16 at noon.
Congratulations to former CESTA Director Giovanna Ceserani and her team, including Stanford colleagues Richard Roberts, Ali Yaycioglu, and Diyi Yang, selected as a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) awardee by Schmidt Sciences, to undertake the project SETS: A Set-Based Architecture for Knowledge Structures.
Two innovative undergraduate programs allow students to explore the essential connections between data, coding, and humanistic pursuits.
Throughout my time with CESTA, I've had the opportunity to learn and work on many different things that I'm interested in, such as working with historical documents, coding music analysis programs, and graphic designing for the anthology. In each project I've been a part of, it has been exciting to see how much technological innovation has to offer for humanities research, and how interdisciplinary study can enhance collaboration from people with different backgrounds and perspectives.
Kiana Hu
Undergraduate Research Intern

CESTA is open to all persons concerned with the study and teaching of digital humanities, in that field’s most capacious definition. Our Center welcomes researchers and interested participants from all walks of academic life, including, but not limited to, faculty and academic-related staff, postdoctoral fellows, graduates and undergraduates, independent scholars, and technological experts. We aim to encourage an environment of collegiality and collaboration, diversity, inclusion, and academic freedom for all participants.

We explicitly affirm the right of students and junior faculty to receive supportive, professional mentoring that respects their intellectual freedom and personal integrity. We expect anyone coming to CESTA, or representing CESTA, to abide by and promote these values so that together we may build a stronger, more welcoming, considerate, and equal community.