Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows help preserve Germantown history
Not only did I improve my digital skills, but I learned about project management, time management, and communication and presentation skills.
Not only did I improve my digital skills, but I learned about project management, time management, and communication and presentation skills.
In collaboration with a local volunteer advocacy group, the 2024 Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows helped create a digital exhibition on the historic Germantown YWCA building in Philadelphia.
The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows—Isbah Ameer '26, Emma Dermansky '27, Nada Elshafey '26, Anna Nguyen '25, and Fiona Shen '27—worked together over the course of the 8-week program to build the website for the exhibition, titled Germantown YWCA: A Social History of a Building. The Germantown YWCA project, led by Min Kyung Lee of the Growth and Structure of Cities department, arose from a collaboration that began in 2022 between the Praxis program, Cities, and the Friends for the Restoration of the Germantown YWCA Building, a local volunteer advocacy group that seeks to preserve and honor the building’s history. Built in 1915, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) building at 5820 Germantown Avenue served as a community center and hub for civil rights and social services for almost a century. Today, the vacant and blighted building is at the center of a legal battle to decide the fate of the property, but many longtime Germantown residents hope to see the building rehabilitated in a way that honors the Y’s legacy of women’s empowerment, anti-racism, and anti-ageism. Lee has been working closely with Liv Raddatz of the Praxis program and Ann Doley of the Friends of the Germantown YWCA to facilitate student engagement with the Germantown community through research. This summer, the Germantown YWCA team collaborated with Digital Scholarship and the Summer Fellows to build a website for a digital exhibition to showcase student research from past and future iterations of the Praxis course.
As part of the summer program, the Fellows were led through an intensive two-week training on digital research and publication skills by the Digital Scholarship team—Alice McGrath (Digital Scholarship Specialist), Stella Fritzell (Digital Scholarship Graduate Assistant), Sean Keenan (Educational Technology Specialist), and Cameron Boucher (Educational and Scholarly Technology Assistant)—and other LITS staff members. The Fellows then spent the remaining six weeks designing, developing, and testing the website for the digital exhibition. During this time, they met regularly with Doley and other members of the Friends of the Germantown YWCA to learn about the building’s history and to workshop ideas for the website. They also learned about the current state of the building and community efforts to restore it from a Reneé Cunningham, the Executive Director of Center in the Park, a senior center that abuts the Germantown YWCA building. Cunningham, who is a graduate of the GSSWSR’s Class of 2005 with a concentration in Social Services Management, was drawn to the Germantown Y project not only by her organization’s proximity to the YWCA building but also by her ties to BMC.
The Fellows’ conversations with Doley, Cunningham, and the Friends of the Germantown YWCA group informed their work as they developed interactive elements for the exhibition, including a timeline of the building’s history, a map of Germantown with markers for key locations in the neighborhood, and a visualization of the building floorplans that allows users to access information, stories, and photos related to specific rooms in the building. They also created pages to showcase archival materials and oral histories collected by Praxis students researching the Germantown YWCA.
The Summer Fellowship culminated in a presentation for community members at Center in the Park, where the fellows shared their work with members of the Friends group and other folks who had a personal connection to the Y. Attendees—including Patricia Burks '71— expressed their delight at the Fellows’ work and shared anecdotes about their own personal experiences at the YWCA and the role it played in their lives.
All in all, the interns finished the program feeling like they had a significant experience. “Not only did I improve my digital skills, but I learned about project management, time management, and communication and presentation skills,” Shen said. Another fellow, Elshafey, agreed, “Turning our ideas into a working … website initially felt like a distant goal, requiring a lot of work and research. While it did require effort, by the end of the process, I realized it was doable and felt great about accomplishing what I wasn’t sure I could do.”
Work on the site will continue into the Spring 2025 semester, when it will be the focus of Lee’s course, CITY B350 Urban Projects: Cities Praxis. The website will be launched in Spring 2025.