Spring 2024

A Decade of CESTA Data

Project Members

Nicole Coleman

Director, Digital Research Fellows Program

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3360-1975

Merve Tekgurler

Senior Fellow, Digital Research Fellows Program

Project Description

This is project undertaken by the 2023-2024 Fellows cohort to explore data available as digital traces of CESTA. The sources are the events listing on the CESTA website, earlier events scraped from the Internet Archive’s web archive of CESTA’s online presence, and CESTA’s newsletter archive from the Mailchimp application.

CESTA’s Web Presence

What is CESTA?

2014

“The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is comprised of the Spatial History Project, Humanities+Design, and the Literary Lab. This interdisciplinary collective of labs operates independently of any one particular home department, and is organizationally housed within the Dean of Research at Stanford University.”

2015

“The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is comprised of the Spatial History Project, Humanities+Design, and the Literary Lab , the Poetic Media Lab, as well as Text Technologies and Chinese Railroad Workers. This interdisciplinary collective of labs operates independently of any one particular home department, and is organizationally housed within the Dean of Research at Stanford University.”

2016

“Stanford’s internationally-renowned Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is a pioneering research hub, where we use and critique digital tools and methods to create new knowledge in cross-disciplinary humanistic inquiry. We are a community of researchers committed to collaborative, open, inclusive, and ethical scholarship setting a standard for best practice in all our endeavors.”

2018

“CESTA: Applying technologies across the Humanities and Social Sciences to enhance our understanding of the world

Stanford’s internationally-renowned Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) is a premier research Center in the Digital Humanities. It is a pioneering research hub, where we apply digital tools and methods to create new knowledge in interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry, changing our understanding of the world, and setting a standard for best practice in all our endeavors.”

2020

“CESTA is an internationally renowned digital humanities center based in Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. We are a diverse community of faculty, students, researchers, and practitioners. Through collaboration with partners across campus, across the Americas, and across the world, our research investigates pressing questions about human history, experience and endeavor. We explore places, global spaces, texts, textual artefacts, data visualization, digital curation, preservation and display, linked data and interoperability, and sustainability. As a scholarly community CESTA supports and encourages cutting-edge work across the humanities and the interpretative social sciences.

CESTA is committed to collaborative, open, inclusive, and ethical scholarship. We seek to set a standard for best practices in all our endeavors. We encourage experimentation, flexible thinking, and productive risk-taking in the pursuit of excellence in digital research. Through our major research projects, fellowship and assistantship programs, seminars, workshops and informal initiatives, CESTA is dedicated to nurturing, training and professionalizing scholars of the future from a variety of disciplines, who will learn how to ask and answer data-driven questions focused on cultural, environmental, historical, social, and textual issues.”

Changes in how CESTA has been described on the website over the years.
Year	Total words	Differences	Insertions	Deletions
2014	45
2015	59	2	1	1
2016	55	8	4	4
2018	72	14	7	7
2020	178	12	7	5

Events Over the Years

Link to the full screen visualization

Code

d3 = require("d3@v6")
dataFile = FileAttachment("data/combinedv10.csv").csv()
parseDate = d3.timeParse("%Y-%m-%d")
data = dataFile.map((d) => {
  return {
    ...d,
    Date: parseDate(d.Date)
  };
})
beeswarm = (data, date, type) => {
  ////// Chart configuration
  const radius = 2.5;
  const padding = 1;
  const size = { w: 500, h: 800 };
  const margin = { top: 100, bottom: 30, left: 130, right: 100 };

  const colors = "#e6ab02";

  const xScale = d3
    .scaleTime()
    .range([0, size.w])
    .domain(d3.extent(data, (d) => d.Date));


  let category = [...new Set(data.map((d) => d[type]))];
  category.reverse();

  ////// Chart drawing
  const svg = d3.select(
    DOM.svg(
      size.w + margin.left + margin.right,
      size.h + margin.top + margin.bottom
    )
  );

  const g = svg
    .append("g")
    .attr("transform", `translate(${margin.left}, ${margin.top})`);

  // x axis
  const xAxis = d3.axisBottom().scale(xScale).ticks(d3.timeYear);
  g.append("g")
    .attr("transform", `translate(0, ${size.h - margin.top})`)
    .call(xAxis)
    .select(".domain")
    .remove();

  // y scale
  const yScale = d3
    .scalePoint()
    .domain(category)
    .range([0, size.h - margin.top - margin.bottom]);
  const yAxis = d3.axisLeft().scale(yScale);

  g.append("g")
    .attr("transform", `translate(0,0)`)
    .call(yAxis)
    .selectAll("text")
    .style("font-size", "12px") // Set font size for y-axis tick labels
    .style("font-weight", "bold")
    .select(".domain")
    .remove();

  //Tooltip
  const toolTip = d3.select("body").append("div").attr("class", "toolTip");

  // mouseover function

  const formatDate = d3.timeFormat("%d %b %Y");

  function nodeMouseOver(event, d) {
    toolTip
      .style("left", event.pageX + 18 + "px")
      .style("top", event.pageY + 18 + "px")
      .style("display", "block")
      .html(
        `${d["Location"].toUpperCase()} - <em>${formatDate(
          d["Date"]
        )}</em><br><strong>${d.Title}</strong><br>${d.Text.slice(0, 200)}...`
      );

    d3.select(event.target).style("cursor", "pointer");

    d3.select(event.target).transition().attr("fill", "#A8234E").attr("r", 10);
  }

  // mouseout function
  function nodeMouseOut(event, d) {
    // Hide tooltip on mouse out
    toolTip.style("display", "none"); // Hide toolTip

    d3.select(event.target).style("cursor", "default");

    d3.select(event.target)
      .transition()
      .attr("fill", "orange")
      .attr("r", radius);
  }

  // circles
  const bee = g
    .append("g")
    .attr("class", "bee")
    .attr("transform", `translate(0,0)`);

  const nodes = bee
    .selectAll("circle")
    .data(data)
    .enter()
    .append("circle")
    .attr("class", "node")
    .attr("cy", (d) => {
      d.y = size.h / 2;
      return d.y;
    })
    .attr("cx", (d) => {
      d.x = xScale(d[date]);
      return d.x;
    })
    .attr("r", radius)
    .attr("fill", "steelblue")
    .attr("fill-opacity", 0.7)
    .on("mousemove", nodeMouseOver)
    .on("mouseout", nodeMouseOut);

  let simulation = d3
    .forceSimulation()
    .force("collide", d3.forceCollide(radius + padding))
    .force("x", d3.forceX((d) => d.x).strength(1))
    .alphaMin(0.00001);

  if (category) {
    simulation.force("y", d3.forceY((d) => yScale(d[type])).strength(1));
  } else {
    simulation.force("y", d3.forceY((d) => d.y).strength(1));
  }

  simulation.nodes(data).on("tick", () => {
    nodes.attr("cx", (d) => d.x).attr("cy", (d) => d.y);
  });

  return svg.node();
}

visualization = beeswarm(data, "Date", "Method")

A CESTA Event Network

Junyi Tao produced this network visualization to show individuals connected through events based on data gathered and wrangled by Merve Tekgurler.