It’s no secret that the Project Vox team features members from all kinds of scholarly backgrounds. From undergraduate students to faculty members, so much of what makes Project Vox unique, and what allows it to accomplish what it has accomplished, can be attributed to the fact that it incorporates so many diverse types of expertise into its membership. As an aspiring academic librarian who joined the team in January 2021, I have always been struck by the fact that librarians have played a key role in the Project from its inception. Three Duke library employees (Liz Milewicz, Will Shaw, and Cheryl Thomas) have been with the team now for over six years, and it’s immediately evident that the expertise of librarians has been immensely valuable to the Project as a whole.
This is my second year working at Duke University Libraries and my second year in library school, so while I have my own ideas about why the inclusion of librarians might be so integral to the Project, I thought it would be best to sit down with one of these long-term librarian members to elucidate the reasons why having librarians on the team has been such a serious boon to Project Vox. With this in mind, I had the fortunate opportunity to speak with Cheryl Thomas about her time on the team, and the way that her librarianship has helped shape Project Vox (and vice versa!). What follows are the major insights from our conversation.
First, a quick history. Cheryl has worked at Duke for nearly 30 years, and for much of that time, she has been the library’s subject specialist in philosophy and religious studies. While this connection to philosophy was enough to make her a natural addition to the nascent Project Vox team in 2014, she was further drawn to the Project owing to its original focus on early modern women philosophers, which tied in quite well with her scholarly background in literature of the French Renaissance. As a founding member of Project Vox, she influenced much of the Project’s structure and focus, and when we began our conversation, she was quick to tell me how much her librarianship still enables her to effect meaningful change in the Project today.
In particular, she noted to me, having a librarian on the team does much to help the Project obtain and usefully present the myriad resources that it does. Not only do librarians have the essential skills needed to acquire these resources, but their very capacity to judge how best to acquire them—the familiarity they have in this area—endows them with a unique perspective that shapes their overall contributions to digital humanities initiatives like Project Vox. When I asked Cheryl to provide me with an example of the effect this knowledge of resources has had, she pointed me towards some of her contributions to Project Vox in its early days: not only was she able to oversee the acquisition of Émilie Du Châtelet’s letters due to her familiarity with the process (something with which her early modern French background also assisted), but her extensive experience using digital resources as a librarian also enabled her to provide useful feedback on the way the Project Vox website was to be laid out. Cheryl told me that, during the very first Project Vox meeting, she proposed the heavy use of images, including those of portraits and documents, that has come to characterize the Project’s site design today. Years of perusing and extracting resources from other scholarly sites—most of which were little more than static webpages—in her daily librarian’s work had made clear to her that a digital humanities initiative like Project Vox needed to be visually engaging in order to succeed. The other founding team members, according to Cheryl, were primarily focused on the philosophical content they wanted to convey on the site, and were therefore less attuned to this need. This early decision to focus on the visual elements of the site, then, was one very key contribution that Cheryl’s librarian expertise helped influence.
Indeed, this relative distance from the strictly philosophical elements of Project Vox has continued to shape Cheryl’s contributions to the team in a productive way. She described her work reviewing material for the website, and in so doing, touched upon the fact that the decidedly academic prose which often characterizes first drafts usually needs revision to make it more readable to a popular audience. Academics who focus solely on philosophy (or any one discipline), Cheryl explained, can easily lose track of how their text might read to a lay reader, or what particular concepts are common knowledge to those outside the discipline. Being an academic librarian, Cheryl serves as an almost ideal reviewer in this respect: her lack of a sole focus on philosophy enables her to point out where additional context or explanations need to be added, but her extremely strong familiarity with academic writing in general also enables her to judge the overall readability of the text. Time and again, Cheryl told me, she has suggested adding historical context and other important details to the Project’s philosopher entries that might otherwise have been missing.
At this point in our conversation, it was now very clear to me why librarians like Cheryl are such an asset to the Project. Before we finished speaking, however, I was curious to learn how Cheryl’s involvement in Project Vox might have also shaped her librarianship. Cheryl was quick to tell me that it had. Most importantly, she said, the Project helps her keep abreast of developments within the field of philosophy, a necessary component of her position as philosophy librarian. While there are other outlets through which she keeps up with the discipline, she maintained that Project Vox remains one of the most cutting-edge in the field, and therefore one of the most useful resources she can consult. The Project is also useful for helping her situate her relationship with Duke’s philosophy department, another part of her work. Her connection to the Project does much to help her sustain and further develop this important relationship.
But perhaps most of all, Cheryl told me, the most useful part of being on the Project Vox team is the fact that it “keeps [her] learning.” While our conversation focused on her unique contributions to the team as a librarian, she ended our discussion by stressing the unique perspective of everyone involved on the team. Their disparate backgrounds and experiences, she told me, each rendered their contributions unique and therefore worthwhile. Indeed, Cheryl explained, this strong element of collaboration across disciplinary lines has proven to be extremely influential in her own librarianship.
Anna Twiddy is a library science master’s student at UNC-Chapel Hill and an intern at Duke University Libraries. She is a member of Project Vox’s Outreach & Assessment Team.
