The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons (hsscommons.ca) is a national-scale, multilingual network designed to support Canadian HSS researchers, students, and academic communities with sharing, accessing, repurposing, and developing scholarly projects, publications, resources, data, and tools. Through features like digital repositories, collaborative groups, projects, discussion forums, ORCID integration, and the ability to generate digital object identifiers (DOI), the HSS Commons aims to facilitate open scholarship, increase findability, and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue across the humanities and social sciences.

This post marks the second in our series, "The HSS Commons in Practice,” which focuses on highlighting real-world examples of how different HSS Commons community members utilize the platform to enhance their academic and professional work. By profiling different user experiences, we hope to inspire others to explore new possibilities within the HSS Commons.

If you have a story about the HSS Commons you would like to share, we would be keen to hear from you! Email us at hsscommons@uvic.ca.

In this post, we meet Brittany Amell (PhD), a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities) and INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Social Scholarship at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (UVic).

Alan: Hey Britt!

Britt: Hey Alan!

Thank you for taking some time to chat, Britt. I want to begin by asking you, when did you start using the Commons?

I first signed up for an account with the Commons during DHSI 2022 (the year it was virtual). I was working on revising my dissertation at the time. But I really started making the most of the Commons a few months later–towards the end of November 2022–after I submitted my dissertation and was getting ready to defend. At that point, I had been trying to figure out how to share aspects of my dissertation more widely in a way that didn’t necessitate more time, energy, or resources than I had available. I had toyed with other options, such as creating an interactive website and so on, because my PhD research had focused on unconventional dissertations. Part of this research included conducting a rhetorical genre analysis of close to 70 dissertations, 50 or so of which were considered unconventional. Something that frequently came up across all phases of data collection was the difficulty ‘dissertators’ had with locating examples of unconventional dissertations. So, here I was with this list of dissertations and my analysis, and I wanted to make it available as soon as possible. 

I also liked the not-for-profit status of HSS Commons and the fact that I could use it to create a project page (see image above) that linked with a repository and took me maybe 10 minutes to set-up. I uploaded a version of the spreadsheet I had used for my analysis (in both .csv and.xcl files) and, after my defense, a copy of my dissertation. Everything was available to others immediately, whereas it took much longer for my institution to upload everything to their repository. 

Okay, and now that you're in this new role as a postdoc with the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), how are you using the Commons for your current work?

Yeah, so it is kind of fun, because there are a lot of opportunities to get to know the HSS Commons and its features a little bit more. In terms of my personal use, I still predominantly use the Commons to share my publications with people so that they're available open access.

That’s great! Are there any other ways you might use the Commons?

For sure. Some other ways I use the Commons is to follow the work of other people. I like that I get alerts when somebody I follow publishes something.

I've played around with the project management features too, which seem really promising, but haven’t been able to use them as much as I would like to.

Oh, and the other way I use it is to introduce myself, to have kind of like an online CV that's just academic. So I have my own personal website, which is not always updated, but it's also a mishmash of my art and all of the different kinds of activities I engage in. The HSS Commons allows me to keep it focused on the academic and academic-adjacent side of things, which I appreciate, especially because I am not on LinkedIn.

I’ve also used it in collaboration with Tim Sobie (team member, ETCL) to republish pieces from the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, just to boost findability but also ensure there is a back-up of all the work we put into the pieces on the Observatory.

Is there anything you think people might want to know about the Commons?

I like that it's really easy, low-key, and straightforward to set-up and use. It's not demanding and it doesn't ask for a lot from you, which is a breath of fresh air in these times of convoluted digital spaces, apps, tools, etc.  

But also, I think I would want to point out that the Commons is a research prototype–it’s right there on the home page, “this site is currently in beta” (see also “About Us”).  Because the Commons does this really big job–it’s sort of an infrastructure, tool, website, or web space–even I forget this sometimes. So, that’s something I really want others to know.

“This site is currently in beta”

Can you say more about that?

Sure! I think I'm still figuring this out for myself, but some things definitely spring to mind. 

One is that a research prototype isn’t a finished product—it’s a research project in progress, one designed to test ideas, frameworks, and functionality…all in real-world contexts. The HSS Commons has evolved and is evolving based on how people actually use it, what they need, and the sorts of gaps that emerge. My sense is that the experimentation, user feedback, iteration, etc. are all a part of the process, certainly, but also a big part of research methods in the digital humanities.

When I think about all the questions the Commons is raising–about digital infrastructure, sustainability, community practice in the humanities and social sciences, and about scholarly communication–I get really excited! Using the Commons, studying how the Commons is used, and refining the Commons are all research activities! Here, I’m thinking of all the work different members of the ETCL have completed over the years in relation to the Commons, including a recent publication from Dan Tracy and Graham Jensen in First Monday regarding open scholarship platforms and the needs of humanities scholars.

Dan Tracy's and Graham Jensen's article in First Monday

The HSS Commons also models the view that infrastructure doesn’t have to come from tech companies or top-down mandates—it can emerge from collaborative, community, and values-driven research in the humanities and social sciences.

But, also: bugs, incomplete features, occasionally funny design choices, and sudden changes to the site all make more sense when you remember that the HSS Commons is a research prototype and research project that is currently in process. I think that when people understand that the Commons itself is a research prototype, you know, that it is research, maybe they are also more likely to see their use of the Commons as a way to contribute to an active, evolving project. 

Lastly, I think that it is fair to say that, as a prototype, the HSS Commons exists in a somewhat precarious space, in that it is not guaranteed. It needs collective investment to continue and grow. Like so much of the work that happens in the digital humanities and social sciences, the HSS Commons relies on grants, collaborators, and, yes, recognition of its value by the wider academic community. 

Do you think that, because this is a research prototype that is experimental, that it might also allow experimental uses of the platform?

Yeah, definitely! The more that people use it, the more we are able to get a sense of how people can use it, too, right? We might have one sense of how the Commons functions but then along comes a person who uses it to, say, connect community researchers outside of academia in order to facilitate a project, and in doing so, finds ways to use it that are quite creative or unexpected. It really comes back to this being research-in-progress and in a real world context or contexts. 

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I think that the other thing that I just wanted to kind of reiterate is that the HSS Commons also functions as a repository. And also that the HSS Commons is not associated with one single institution or person. Instead, it is really a result of a partnership between several groups, partners, and institutions. It’s important to have these kinds of tertiary or third spaces–particularly for those who maybe don't want to be associated with a specific institution or a single academic institution, or who maybe engage in work that pushes back on those sorts of traditional institutions. 

Repository feature on the HSS Commons

Research happens in a lot of different places that aren't just solely academic, but that research still needs to be backed up, still needs to be findable. And researchers exist everywhere, not just in academia, and they may want to be able to connect with others beyond their immediate everyday circles. The HSS Commons has this social piece to it that can, I think, support and spark these kinds of connections. 

Yeah-- I also think that that's one of the strengths of the Commons-- providing the space to publish some of the work that researchers do that is not a journal article, or a formal publication, but that is still stuff you spend time doing that sometimes gets lost or maybe only shared on social media. So, the Commons gives these items a longer term place to be.

Yes! So true. So many tweets, governmental memos, and stuff like that people have linked to in their references aren't there anymore. Sometimes they can be found again on the Internet Archive (which, thank you Internet Archive!!) but it’s not a bad idea to have additional spaces to place that content.

The Commons is also often more flexible than institutional repositories because, as you say, researchers may encounter these limitations with the repositories, whether it’s getting items uploaded in a timely way or encountering other sort of long bureaucratic processes.

Yeah, totally. Or the institutional repository may simply be unable to accept the file type your work is in (whether this is an audio, video, or other type of file)--this is something folks engaging in unconventional scholarship might encounter. I remember there being a note on the institutional websites where I did my PhD– “Your dissertation must be printable.” There was a very real bias towards .doc and .pdf files. 

The other thing I appreciate too is that there is a counter on the number of downloads and views associated with a publication. As an early Career researcher, the pressure to demonstrate your impact is real, especially when applying for grants or academic positions. For example, recently I went and took a look at the counts associated with the publications from my dissertation publication page, and was able to say: look, this is a pretty significant number, even if it is only one type of metric. It just helps when it comes to demonstrating that impact, particularly because I think it's often hard for folks in the humanities and allied fields to communicate the impact of their work to colleagues who are situated in disciplines where, for example, impact factor or citation counts really feature strongly as persuasive bits of evidence. So, even though I don't really agree fully that impact can only be demonstrated through quantifiable means, it does help with legibility...with being seen by others, particularly in those higher stakes situations like grant or job applications.

Thanks, Britt!

Always a pleasure!

1. HSS Commons in Practice