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 fourth 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.

Did you know signing up to the HSS Commons is easy and free? Learn more here or reach out to us at hsscommons@uvic.ca.

In this post, we meet Parham Aledavood. As of September 2024, Parham is the associate director of Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). He is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal, where his research focuses on an analysis of trauma and genre in contemporary novels of migration. His research interests include postcolonial studies, planetary studies, and computational literary studies.

Britt A: Hi Parham! Thanks for agreeing to chat with me about the Commons!

Parham: Hi Britt! No problem!

So, to start, perhaps you can tell me about when you first began using the Commons?

I started using the Commons around two years ago, when I signed up for DHSI 2023. That was my first DHSI, and I attended the online version, which introduced me to HSS Commons—it’s where I accessed my course materials. Since then, I’ve continued using it for DHSI 2024, which I attended in person, and now again for DHSI 2025. So, for me, the Commons has mostly been a platform I use through DHSI.

Group Page for DHSI 2025

Nice. Building on that—since you've used the Commons across multiple DHSIs, could you talk about some specific ways you've used it? Maybe both as a participant and now as someone involved in organizing?

Sure! Before I got involved with organizing DHSI, I mainly used HSS Commons as a participant to access my course pack and the Institute lectures. What stood out to me was the ability to explore materials from other courses too. Each course has a brief description on the DHSI website, but that only gives a general idea of what to expect. The course packs, on the other hand, offer a much fuller picture.

This was especially helpful in 2023, when I attended DHSI online. I browsed not only my course’s materials but also others, which really opened my eyes to the range of topics. Since many DHSI courses recur annually, seeing those materials inspired me to return the next year for a different course. That’s exactly what happened—I came back in 2024 because of what I discovered in 2023.

As for my experience now, on the organizational side—it was clear that we wanted to keep using HSS Commons to support DHSI.

We began planning for it early on, but this year marked a huge transition from DHSI in Victoria, where it was held for 20 or so years, to DHSI in Montreal. So that slowed things down a bit on our end.

Despite the HSS Commons team being super responsive and helpful, we only managed to launch the DHSI 2025 group about a month before the institute began.

Initially, our goal was to use the Commons as we had in previous years—for course packs and Institute lectures. But I also wanted to go further. I knew the platform could support more than just static materials, so I spoke with the Commons team about ways to engage participants more actively. One of the features I was particularly excited about was the forum, which I can talk more about in a bit. But that’s how we got to using the Commons for DHSI 2025, and how we started thinking about expanding its role.

I want to hear more about what you had in mind for using the forum!

Okay, sure! In the past, DHSI had a really active presence on social media—especially on Twitter. For example, during DHSI 2023, people used the hashtag to connect, coordinate accommodations, plan social outings, or just stay in touch before and during the event.

But now, as you know, Twitter no longer functions the way it used to, and there’s no clear replacement. People are scattered across platforms—some on LinkedIn, some on Mastodon, others on Bluesky—and everyone has strong opinions about which is best. We didn’t want to choose one and risk excluding parts of the community. So, to preserve that sense of connection, we turned to the HSS Commons forum.

The forum allows users to start threads, ask questions, and engage in ongoing conversations—almost like the early days of the internet. That structure really appealed to me as a way to recreate the informal, community-driven energy that social media used to provide.

That said, I wouldn’t call our forum launch a success—at least not this first year. We introduced it too late, only about a month before DHSI 2025, so there wasn’t enough time for people to adopt it organically. Still, I’m hopeful for next year. For DHSI 2026, we plan to highlight the forum more clearly, encouraging participants to use it as a central space to connect.

And I think that’s going to be even more important moving forward. The social media landscape isn’t likely to consolidate anytime soon, and people are still asking us, “Where can we find each other?” Since most of our participants are already members of HSS Commons—many joined this year using their ORCID—we see real potential there. In fact, the number of people who signed up exceeded our expectations, which was great to see.

So, while the forum didn’t quite take off this time, it’s a key area we want to develop for DHSI 2026. We see it as a promising alternative for community-building in a fragmented digital landscape.

Yeah, I totally understand—especially with social media becoming so fragmented. I really hear what you’re saying. So, focusing on DHSI 2025 for a moment—what specific features of the Commons did you use this year? Was it mostly the repository? Did you try the calendar or anything else?

This year, we mainly used the repository to host our course packs. But we’re also planning to keep using it moving forward—especially for the DHSI Conference and Colloquium. I was in the room for a few sessions, and people kept asking, “Where can we access your slides?” The reality is, not everyone has a personal website or platform to share materials.

So, we’re working with our Conference and Colloquium co-chairs to encourage presenters to upload their slides to HSS Commons. It’s not just a way to share materials—it’s also a space where people can showcase their ongoing research and academic projects. For instance, the CV feature on the platform allows participants to highlight their work and connect with peers. That’s very much in line with the purpose of the Colloquium, which isn’t built around a single theme. Instead, it’s meant to be a hub where people from different courses—who’ve spent most of the week in separate classrooms—can come together and share what they’re working on.

We’d love for those connections to last beyond DHSI. Not everyone exchanges contact info at the end, but having a shared space like HSS Commons where materials live on makes it easier to stay connected.

This was the first year we started managing our group on the platform, but I’m optimistic. I think there’s a lot more we can explore in terms of features and engagement going forward.

Yeah, and that’s one of the nice things about the Commons—it can support a low-effort setup when that’s all you have capacity for. You can just get the group started, use the repository, and that’s enough. But it also has the potential to grow with you or with the organization as things evolve. It’s flexible in that way, which is really helpful.

Absolutely, I completely agree. But I’ll also say that one of our concerns this year—and this relates to your mention of the calendar feature—was the number of platforms we were already using. The calendar on HSS Commons is great in theory: you can list events and have everything centralized. But for us, it felt like one platform too many.

We had our main DHSI website with some information, and then we were also working with Praxis—the platform run by the School of Professional Development here at the University of Montreal. They handled all the registration logistics. So once someone registered, they accessed Praxis to view their course info, and that platform also had its own calendar system with automated reminders.

The problem is, that platform isn’t really built for something of DHSI’s scale. And we don’t have control over that platform or the notifications that were going out. So participants were getting reminders like “Day 3 of DHSI is tomorrow in Room X” five times in a row for each course day. It was overwhelming and definitely not ideal.

So we decided not to add another layer by using the HSS Commons calendar, as we didn’t want to spam participants further with duplicate or conflicting messages across platforms. But it’s something we’ve learned from.

I think in many ways this year really felt like a test run for us. Now that we’ve gone through it once, we’re starting to think more strategically about how to streamline everything for DHSI 2026. We’ve got more time to plan now, and one of our big goals is figuring out how to organically merge these platforms—so that participants aren’t getting the same kinds of messages from three different places at once.

Oof, yes that does sound overwhelming! I can see why the DHSI planning and coordination team would want to be more strategic. Switching gears a little—do you use HSS Commons personally as well?

Yes. Mostly, I use the Commons to keep my personal profile up to date—that’s been my main use so far. I’ve been a bit slow to explore online platforms more broadly. Honestly, I’m somewhat hesitant to put my research online in general.

But if I were to share it, I’d prefer to do that on HSS Commons rather than LinkedIn or even a personal website. The Commons has a smaller audience, but it’s a more relevant one. The people who are likely to see your work there are exactly the kind of people you'd want to engage with—people in the same field, or with shared interests in digital humanities. So to me, it feels like a much more meaningful space to share academic work.

Are there any other features that you think that you do find useful, or that you think will be useful?

There’s one feature I’ve been thinking about, but I haven’t fully explored it yet—that would be the blog option. In the past, people would share their DHSI experiences on Twitter or other platforms. We’re really feeling the absence of those informal ways of sharing experiences. So, I’m wondering if the blog might be a way to help fill that gap. It would be a space where we could invite participants to share their reflections—not just about being on-site at DHSI, but also about their individual courses.

That’s something I keep coming back to: how can people really get a sense of what a course is like before they take it? Course packs are helpful, but they’re usually just syllabi or readings. It’s difficult to capture the experience of being in the room. A blog post, on the other hand—especially from a student who has taken that specific course—could offer insights into how the course actually felt, what kind of work they did, and how it connected to their interests.

Another use of the Commons I’d like to explore more is using it to showcase student projects. For example, we have popular recurring courses like CollectionBuilder, where participants build digital collections over the week. Some may share their work on their own personal sites if they have them, but it would be great to have a centralized place to share those projects within the DHSI group on the Commons.

The same goes for other courses like Coding Fundamentals. Many attendees are new to digital humanities, and they might not have an obvious place to share their first DH project. The Commons could be that space.

On the last day of DHSI, we host a class overview session—a reimagining of the old “Show & Tell”—where instructors present some of the projects their students created. Right now, it’s usually just a few slides. But I think there’s potential here to expand that into something more permanent and visible on the Commons. That way, we’re not just wrapping up the week—we’re documenting and celebrating the work in a lasting way, while also offering something participants can continue to engage with afterwards.

Yeah, definitely. I love the way you’re thinking about all of this—it’s really exciting to hear. Is there anything you think new users—or people who’ve never heard of the Commons—might want to know?

One thing I’d recommend is to really take the time to explore the Commons. We’ve had conversations with people who said, “I joined HSS Commons, but I wasn’t sure what to do next.” And I get that—it’s not just a single-use link or a one-time login. It’s a platform with so many useful features, but it’s easy to miss them if you don’t take that time.

It sounds like having a short, optional tutorial available for when someone first joins to quickly walk them through the key features could be useful…perhaps even something via video for those more visually inclined…

Thanks for your time today, Parham!

Thanks Britt!

1. DHSI
2. HSS Commons in Practice