Mapping Change: Student Research Projects Supported by Penn Libraries Resources

Student projects created for the undergraduate course "Transformations of Urban America: Making the Unequal Metropolis, 1945 to Today," show how Penn Libraries collections and services join together to improve student learning.

Each fall in History Professor Brent Cebul’s course, more than 70 students research postwar urban renewal and its benefits and harms. Early in the semester, the class visits the Libraries’ Research Data and Digital Scholarship Exchange, where Mapping & Geospatial Data Librarian Girmaye Misgna (pictured above) leads students in drawing maps documenting their walks through University City and West Philadelphia neighborhoods. Girmaye also enrolls each student in ArcGIS StoryMaps, a web presentation platform that students use to combine maps, multimedia, text, and other content for their final projects.

The students’ StoryMaps projects showcase the diversity and depth of the Libraries’ digital collections. They use split-screen and slider map displays to compare census data across decades, illustrating neighborhood changes in demographics and housing stock. Many StoryMaps display photos, tables, and maps from neighborhood redevelopment plans in our digitized Philadelphia Neighborhoods Project Collection and the HathiTrust Digital Library, as well as our library stacks. One StoryMaps project used our digitized 1939 Philadelphia Social Base Map to show the dense concentration of frat houses (and tap rooms) adjacent to the Penn campus prior to urban renewal.

StoryMaps focused on University City and the Black Bottom use the University Archives’ Walter D. Palmer Collection and the Libraries’ digital archives of student newspapers The Daily Pennsylvanian and The Bennett News.

The Libraries’ ProQuest Historical Newspapers database is rich in contemporary press coverage of renewal projects. Old Philadelphia Inquirer articles document planning controversies. Philadelphia’s Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune, provides an important voice for West Philadelphia residents facing dislocation from urban renewal. In one StoryMaps project, articles and advertisements from the Jewish Exponent document the dislocation of a Jewish community center during the development of Society Hill.

Helping Professor Cebul’s students locate primary sources for their urban renewal research is great fun and a real challenge too. We look forward to the Fall 2025 semester, to guide a new group of students through the Penn Libraries collections for their StoryMaps.