This post is part of our Behind the Scenes blog series.
Ten years ago, a group of scholars met at the University of Pennsylvania to plan future collaborations. The group comprised colleagues from several universities around the world, including Lisa Shapiro and Marguerite Deslauriers from Canada, Karen Detlefsen and Marcy Lascano from the US, and Jacqui Broad (via computer) from Australia. I recorded snippets of our conversations in a little notebook [image below] I bought in Paris when viewing some Du Châtelet manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale with Karen. The notes from that optimistic September meeting laid out all kinds of intriguing plans and ideas for the future of scholarship and teaching in the history of philosophy. On a margin of one page in the notebook, there’s a brief notation that reads “Duke website.” That’s all. And then next to it, a little scribble adds: “We need new narratives.”
In all honesty, although I had some grandiose ideas about new narratives in the history of philosophy ten years ago, when I wrote the words “Duke website” in my notebook, I knew next to nothing about the web. I couldn’t have told you what a host server is, what HTML might be, or even what “digital humanities” meant. But one other scribble in my notebook turned out to be especially prescient: it says “we need to collaborate with libraries.” Years later, there’s no doubt at all that Project Vox would not exist without the leading efforts of my three wonderful colleagues from Duke Libraries, Liz Milewicz, Cheryl Thomas and Will Shaw. They have been with the project since the beginning, even before we had any real funding or a proper name, and they have shaped it in countless ways.
So, what ever happened to that nascent idea of a Duke website devoted to “new narratives”? Over the past decade, it has become what we now know as Project Vox. In that time, we’ve surpassed 180,000 unique visitors by IP address (Google Analytics) from 190 countries around the world, with close to 300,000 page views. Vox has always been both a public facing website—an open source hub for information about neglected voices in the history of philosophy—and also a pedagogical endeavor. So it is just as important to our mission that as of this Fall, more than 100 faculty, staff and students here at Duke and in universities around the world have helped us create and expand our site. We’ve collaborated with colleagues and students in Brazil, Canada, England, France, and Germany. We have now reached one dozen philosopher entries spanning the time frame from the Italian Renaissance all the way to the 19th century. We have covered thinkers from England, France, Holland, Germany, Brazil and Mexico (New Spain at the time). It’s fair to say that, together, we have helped to spawn new narratives of the history of philosophy. I’m just as optimistic about the next decade and all that our many thriving collaborations will bring.
Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and former Chair of Philosophy at Duke University. He is currently working on the philosophy of Émilie Du Châtelet, whose work he also regularly teaches.
