Digitizing Student Theater History

Lucia Shen spent their fifth year on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus exploring new ideas and enjoying interdisciplinary work, especially by creating a website to bring current students and alumni closer to the University Archives.

Before graduating in May with a major in international relations and political science, Shen was part of Carnegie Mellon University’s highly selective Fifth Year Scholar program. Only five students were selected to be a part of the 2026 cohort. Selected students receive free tuition to spend an extra year exploring classes beyond their standard coursework, and an additional $7,000 fellowship to pursue a project of their choosing.

Shen’s website, the Scotch’n’Soda Digital Collection, hosts digitized materials from Scotch'n'Soda that are held in the University Archives. Scotch'n'Soda is CMU’s student theater company, and one of the nation's oldest student theater groups. The group formed in 1907, and since then has produced highly anticipated musicals each year during CMU’s homecoming and Carnival weekends (with a hiatus during World War 1 and World War II). Scotch'n'Soda also hosts various smaller shows throughout the school year, including original student work.

Bringing the Past Into the Present

Shen was inspired to start this project by their previous tenure as the president of Scotch’n’Soda.

“I would get emails all the time saying, ‘Hey, I was in this show, do you have any photos or a copy of the program?’ I realized that these records were an important part of people’s memories,” they said.

Most of the answers to these emails could be found in the Archives, which has boxes of ephemera such as programs, posters and newspaper clippings from Scotch’n’Soda productions throughout history. The Archives also have recordings and annotated scripts from student productions. One of the most popular pieces of Scotch’n’Soda history in the Archives is a recording of “Pippin, Pippin” from its original run during Homecoming 1967. “Pippin, Pippin” was written by 1968 College of Fine Arts graduate and award-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz — which opened on Broadway five years later as the Tony Award-winning musical “Pippin.”

Shen said that one of the most rewarding moments about going through Scotch’n’Soda archives was realizing how similar the club’s history has been over time.

“One newsclipping I sent to my friend, who was the president of Scotch’n’Soda last year, was an interview from the 1950s. It was satirical, so people were saying ‘you might find this guy sleeping on the table in the cafe because he hasn't slept in three days building the set’ — silly things like that where it’s validating to know that we’ve always struggled but always we’ve made it work,” they said.

The project to host digitized versions of these materials will allow current members to more easily access the history Scotch’n’Soda, as well as make it available to alumni and researchers beyond Pittsburgh. To do this, Shen pulled from UX and UI design skills that they developed throughout their time at Carnegie Mellon, especially in the Human Computer Interaction program.

“I’m really excited about putting this online, because otherwise these materials just exist in a box,” they said.

A key part of the project is to create the website as a piece of the legacy of Scotch’n’Soda that can be passed down to a webmaster or historian, so that these pieces of the past continue to be brought into the present day, and current shows and materials can be archived.

Working Within the Archive

Shen started the project by reaching out to Community Collections Archivist Crystal Johnson and Collections Archivist Emily Davis. “I had never talked to them before, but I reached out a few months before the deadline to apply [to the Fifth Year Scholars program]. They were really interested in my project idea, and they’ve really been the backbone of this,” they said.

The archivists helped guide Shen through the process the project requires. Last semester, Shen spent at least three hours in the archives every Thursday going through folders and files to curate the materials that will be hosted digitally on the website. Then, they organized the materials and sent them to CMU’s digitization and imaging services team, which professionally scanned and returned the materials.

“One cool thing about having someone so immersed in a collection is that they find a lot of things we’ve never seen, so they’ve been able to share the cool things that they come across,” said Johnson. “Lucia has been such a great fixture in the archives.”