Behind the Scenes: Teaching Digital Publishing with Project Vox

Posted on September 22, 2017
This fall Project Vox starts its fourth year as a digital publishing initiative. While we’ve been fortunate to receive internal and external funding to help support student team members’ work, nearly half have been volunteers—students who worked with our team merely to gain experience in team-based research projects and digital publishing. Many of these students came from library science and information studies programs, to gain firsthand exposure to changes in scholarly communication. 
After observing how much student team members learned through this work, co-director Andrew Janiak and I decided to formally build a course around Project Vox. We’re greatly aided in this pursuit by North Carolina Central University library science student Mattia Begali, who is working with us over the next year to plan, implement, and assess this pilot digital publishing course at Duke University for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Our impetus for making this leap into the classroom came from the NEH-funded Versatile Humanists at Duke program, which is supporting this and other pedagogical experiments to innovate and improve doctoral education. 
We’re excited by this challenge—to encourage students’ practical, thoughtful engagement in digital scholarly publishing and in team-based digital humanities work—and eager to see what we learn in the process about other ways Project Vox can innovate academic instruction.