The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows program is a paid summer internship opportunity for Bryn Mawr undergraduate students to learn digital research and publication skills and gain professional experience by collaborating on public-facing digital scholarship projects. Fellows explore key issues and methods in digital scholarship, critical making, and multi-modal research through a combination of hands-on work, instruction, and discussion (view syllabus). Fellows also have opportunities to visit local organizations, learn about careers in libraries and digital research, and present their work publicly.
NB: The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Program is currently on hiatus and will resume in the Summer of 2026.
Past cohorts and projects
Germantown YWCA: The Social History of a Building (2024)
Fellows: Isbah Ameer, Emma Dermansky, Nada Elshafey, Anna Nguyen, Fiona Shen
Faculty advisor and project director: Min Kyung Lee (Growth and Structure of Cities)
Program & project mentors Liv Raddatz (Praxis), Ann Doley (Friends for the Restoration of the Germantown YWCA).
The 2024 fellows built a digital exhibition telling the history of the now-abandoned Germantown YWCA building on Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, with features including a digital collection, interactive map of the neighborhood, interactive floorplan, and timeline. The site will be launched in Spring 2025 after it is completed by a praxis course taught by Min Kyung Lee.
The Reactor Room, An Immersive Chornobyl Exhibition (2023)
Fellows: Mst. Fariha Tasnim Busra, Katya Little, Ksenia Mats, Leela Smelser, and Skye Zhong
Faculty advisor & project director: Professor José Vergara (Russian)
Graduate assistant & project manager: Hilde Nelson (History of Art)
Leadership team: Alice McGrath (Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist), Bronwen Densmore (Makerspace Coordinator), Soaad Elbahwati (Educational & Scholarly Technology Assistant), Sean Keenan (Educational Technology Specialist)
The 2023 cohort collaborated on designing and building a multi-modal exhibition focused on the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster and its legacies, including the current moment of threat caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fellows learned the basics of exhibition design, digital publishing, CAD, critical making, fabrication, and woodworking. Guided by faculty and staff mentors, they researched the cultural and ecological history of Chornobyl and created interactive experiences, including a model of reactor room #4 and digital content that may include data visualizations, maps, interactive timelines, or other multimedia narrative elements. Their work will culminate in a Winter 2023 installation that will also feature scholarship by students in Professor Vergara’s fall course.
Critical Web Design Toolkit (2022)
Cameron Boucher (Russian ’23), Rafiun Haque (Computer Science ’25), Adrianna Morsey (Cities ’23), Arlowe Willingham (Linguistics ’24)
Leadership team: Alice McGrath, Digital Scholarship Specialist; Chris Boyland, Educational Technology Specialist; Karina Gonzalez, Educational & Scholarly Technology Assistant
The 2022 cohort built a critical web design toolkit and designed and developed web publishing infrastructure for multiple projects, including 1) an annotated, bilingual digital edition of a literary text and 2) a minimal, static website builder that can be used for digital exhibitions and exhibition websites. Working with the program director and other mentors, fellows learned the basics of front-end web development and explore various considerations for social-justice-oriented infrastructure design, including: disability access, environmental sustainability, the digital divide, language divides, and information equity. The team will engage with these concepts in order to design and develop tools for digital publishing and faculty-led digital scholarship projects. They will also collaborate on creating learning resources for the Bryn Mawr community.
Text Mining The College News (2021)
Team: Linda Chen, Marianela Luna-Torrado, Avery Matteo, Aanandi Murlidharan, Al Nash (DS Fellows); Stella Fritzell (Digital Scholarship Graduate Assistant); Rosemarie Fettig (EaST Assistant); Alice McGrath (Project Director)
The 2021 cohort collaborated on learning python and text mining, data management, and data visualization techniques to work with the corpus The College News, a Bryn Mawr student publication that ran from 1914 to 1968. Fellows extracted and visualized data, pursued individual research projects that engage with this collection, and also created a data making project: a tactile map. The goal of this project was to surface marginalized histories within archival collections through critical data visualization, and to explore this student newspaper and discover what it can teach us about college history over a crucial period of social change.
Read a blog post by 2021 fellow Marianela Luna-Torrado about this project.
’24, ’31 Students Study Race (2020)
Cindy Chea, Hilana El-Mekkoussi, Peyton Moriarty, Tino Nguruve, Elizabeth Zhao
Project director: Dr. Vanessa Davies
The 2020 cohort built a digital exhibition about two conferences on race that Bryn Mawr students co-organized in the early-twentieth century. The 1924 conference was a three-day event co-organized by students at Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Penn and held on Swarthmore’s campus. Students—black and white, male and female—from other institutions attended, exchanged ideas, and socialized with one another. The 1931 conference, a one-day event, was organized by Bryn Mawr students and held on Bryn Mawr’s campus. The event featured many prominent speakers of color, including Walter White, head of the NAACP, Alice Dunbar Nelson, poet and member of the Interracial Committee of the Society of Friends, and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis. The fellows designed and produced a digital exhibition featuring maps, digital exhibits, data visualizations, and more interactive content about these conferences.
Journeyways to the West (2019)
Nitisha Bhandari, Dorothee Feng, Hanjun Huang, Tina Zhong
Project Director: Professor Shiamin Kwa (East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Fellows built an interactive 3D environment demonstrating forced perspective staging on a baroque stage
Bryn Mawr History of Women in Science (2018)
Elia Anagnostou, Tanjuma Haque, Arianna Li, Linda Zhu
Fellows built a VR environment based on archival photos of BMC’s early science labs.
Visualizing College Women (2017)
Mimi Benkoussa, Madeline Perry, Nathália Santos, Claudia Zavala
Fellows created data visualizations and a timeline portal for the College Women Project.
Video by Claudia Zavala (Cities ’19, DSRA) and Stella Fritzell (Classics, DSGA). NB: If you are currently blocking 3rd party cookies on your browser, the video may not load. You can also view the video on viddler.