Ongoing Services in the Digital Humanities: A User Assessment of Project Vox

Digital Humanities scholars have not traditionally been focused on the overall usability of their online projects or how users perceive these resources. As a result, Digital Humanities is in danger of leaving out users voices entirely. This presents an opportunity for libraries, as partners, to add value to digital scholarship by assessing the extent to which Digital Humanities resources are meeting the needs of its users. The following study is a qualitative user assessment of Project Vox, a Digital Humanities initiative that provides pedagogical and research materials on underrepresented philosophers from the early modern period. Through interviewing six philosophy professors, this user assessment takes into account humanists’ existing workflows, investigates their usage and the usability of the site, and finally examines how they perceive some of Project Vox’s practices and the broader Digital Humanities landscape.