Team profile excerpted from the Project Vox FY2023 Annual Report

Each year the Project Vox team prepares an annual report for our advisory board and key stakeholders at Duke University ... We are excited to share the the tremendous efforts made by the student team members this academic year.

Key Accomplishments this past year:

• Publication of a new philosopher entry on Nísia Floresta
• Feasibility study and research for a new philosopher entry on Germaine de Stäel
• Research and writing for a themed entry on “Poetry and Philosophy”
• Remote collaboration with international faculty, graduate, and undergraduate team members
• Completion of a Duke undergraduate Bass Connections tutorial course based on Project Vox
• Redesign of the Teaching section of the Project Vox website based on user feedback
• Student presentation on Project Vox at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase

Research and Student Engagement:

• 27 team members, including students, faculty, staff and one post-doctoral fellow
• 12+ disciplines represented by team members
• 7 institutions represented by our team members and contributors

This year’s team (our largest to date) included twenty students. As always, while faculty and staff provided leadership, mentorship and training, the students ran the project: coordinating the team’s work; researching, writing and publishing entries; updating our website; and helping us to realize this year’s goals. This year the team piloted a credit-earning course that provided formal instruction in research, writing, publishing and collaboration for Project Vox; incorporated more student research and writing into the site; researched new topics and figures; and worked on remote teams to research and publish a new philosopher entry. We were also delighted to be invited to present at the 2023 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, where student team members shared what it meant to be part of a global initiative to reform philosophy.

Our Project Vox Classroom

This year Project Vox continued its engagement with interdisciplinary research and undergraduate mentoring in philosophy and art history. The Du Châtelet and Sor Juana entries were updated to include more research on these philosophers’ portraits: essays written by students in Duke Professor Susanna Caviglia’s undergraduate art history class (Fall 2021) were edited and added to the Project Vox site by the Images Lead (Summer 2022).

In Fall 2022, two seasoned Project Vox graduate students translated our team’s approach to collaborative research and publishing into a formal course. This 300-level tutorial introduced undergraduates to methods of research, writing and citation in art history and philosophy; tools for documenting their research (e.g., Box, AirTable, Zotero); and strategies for writing about philosophy for a general, interdisciplinary and online audience. Through collaborative and independent assignments, students developed the foundation for a future Project Vox entry on the historical relationships between poetry and philosophy.

This training in images research came in handy in Spring 2023, when a small team of Duke undergraduate students researched, described, and prepared images for the Nísia Floresta entry. Other team members began researching images for a Germaine de Staël entry (anticipated 2024 publication). Through careful research, coordination and a little luck, a team member visited the Maison Auguste Comte (Paris, France), where she secured images related to Staël as well as a portrait of Floresta (included in this year’s entry).

This year we also began exploring how to build new forms of publishing and research into Project Vox’s workflows. The 2022 Story+ team’s visualization of Wikipedia-based philosopher networks raised questions about how to replicate and sustain this kind of work. That team’s Project Manager, who was also the incoming AY2022–2023 Project Manager for the Project Vox Team, worked with the co-directors and the Technical Lead to draft potential workflows for sharing downloadable JSON datasets. She also conducted a Wikipedia editing session with the project team, demonstrating how to make more women philosophers discoverable on Wikipedia by making simple metadata edits that connected these philosophers to the famous men they influenced and vice versa.

Visit the Project Vox website and read additional information from the annual report.