The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons (hsscommons.ca) is a multilingual network designed to support 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 is part of 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. This post is available as a video or you can follow the transcript below.

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 hear from Lindsey Seatter, faculty at the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Sajib: Good morning, Lindsey. I’m really happy that you made the time to meet with me and share some of your experience with the HSS Commons. How are you doing today?

Lindsey: I’m doing great. How are you?

Sajib: I’m doing all right. Thank you for asking. So, as we have this conversation, I will basically ask you a few questions, and some follow-up questions may arise. Feel free to answer the questions that you are comfortable with. And, yes, you can also skip any questions if you don’t feel like answering them. That’s totally fine.

Lindsey: Okay. Sounds good.

Sajib: So before I begin, may I ask you to quickly introduce yourself? How are you related to ETCL, and how are you related to the HSS Commons and all of these things?

Lindsey: Yes, of course. My name is Dr. Lindsey Seatter. I’m an instructor in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I am also the editor-in-chief of IDEAH, which is the Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts and Humanities journal. My history with the ETCL goes back, going on about 15 years. I started as a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, doing Romanticism, women’s writing, and a bit of digital humanities. And it was the third of those interests that got me connected to the ETCL. I started as a research assistant, working on various projects like WRECK. And then over time, I moved into the DHSI space. I was the co-lead on the DHSI conference and colloquium for a good time. And my work on that portion of the ETCL’s interests is what led to the creation of IDEAH and eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of that journal.

Sajib: Excellent. Thank you so much. I am really glad to know how you have been related to the IDEAH journal from the very beginning. You are one of the founding editors, which is great. So, may I ask you this question now? When did you first start using the HSS Commons, and what attracted you to this platform, not exactly as an editor, but in the other roles that you have?

Lindsey: I think I started using the HSS Commons probably back in 2020–2021. I remember doing one of the test cases while people were developing the platform, before it was live, and creating a profile for myself. At that point, I was a PhD student. And so, I was particularly drawn to the platform because it was a place where I could kind of share my interests, my research, and the work I was doing. I thought it could be quite helpful when it came to making connections with other people in the academic space, and could possibly lead to finding jobs or RAships or postdocs, or whatever that might look like. So I remember thinking that the platform could be particularly useful for people who were in the early-career scholar stage of their academic life.

I also loved that the platform was Canadian. And I think that we see models that share some similarities with the HSS Commons that are based in the United States. But there seemed to be something particularly interesting to me that this was led by a Canadian institution and would maybe lead to a stronger representation of Canadian scholars, academics, and para-academics on the platform, which was of particular interest to me, given where I live and work.

Sajib: Excellent. Thank you so much. That means you have been involved with the HSS Commons since before it went live.

Lindsey: I was just a little helper. It was all a bunch of other folks. But it was fun to be able to get on and test it and see what it looked like before—like a peek behind the curtain.

Sajib: Excellent! So now, as you have been involved with the HSS Commons for quite a long time—I mean, before it was “officially born”—my next question is: as the founding editor of IDEAH, as well as its current editor-in-chief, what motivated you to choose the HSS Commons to support this journal’s development and publication?

Lindsey: It’s a really great question. In the journal’s first iteration, we were kind of working between Google Docs and Word when it came to compiling the journal’s essays, conducting the copyediting, the page proofs, and finally publication. And there were a couple of problems that we ran into by working on local documents on each person’s individual computer. One of those was the collaborative aspect. The second was version control. In terms of version control, we were finding that sending emails back and forth with Word documents attached made it really hard to keep track of what was happening when and who was touching them. And that becomes a particular problem when you’re trying to track copyediting, as well as authors’ comments on their own papers, and kind of working back and forth to get a final copy.

So, the HSS Commons repository feature offered us the opportunity to upload the documents as they came in, create folders and files in an organized way, so that we could always track the paper at any particular stage and know who was touching it and who hadn’t touched it yet. The other thing that really helped is that you can create these collaborative projects on the Commons. So rather than just me working on the document myself, it can be me, JT, our managing editor, and some of our guest editors if it’s a special issue. All of us can be part of that project together. And so then we all have access to the repository and the documents.

And this, I think, helps with facilitating collaboration between the IDEAH team and other folks that we’re working with, by having the access all in one place.

Sajib: Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing especially the feature of the HSS Commons that allows collaborative efforts or collaborative work. As an editor-in-chief, you are talking about the journal management system, but as a researcher, anybody can also use the HSS Commons in a similar way when they are involved with collaborative research. So, the collaborative feature of the HSS Commons is not particularly dedicated only to research, but also to other activities like managing a journal or publishing a journal.

So, thank you for bringing up that feature because it’s actually at the core of the HSS Commons: collaboration. I’m glad that editors like you are being helped by this particular feature of the HSS Commons.

Now, when you support any kind of editorial workflow, we know that it involves several stages. It starts with submissions, or maybe with a call for submissions. Then that is followed by submissions from the authors. Then there are peer review stages. Then there is communication back and forth with peer reviewers, authors, and editors, and finally publication. So thinking about all these step-by-step stages of a journal publication workflow, how are you, or how have you been, able to use the HSS Commons to support this workflow?

Or did you find it useful at all, or not at all? What is your experience?

Lindsey: I think that gets to the heart of one of the reasons why we chose to move things onto the Commons: we could envision a way of tracking that workflow. And so the Commons kind of fits into a suite of different tools that we have compiled together to make the journal run.

We kind of call it the “Little Engine That Could.” IDEAH is definitely a journal that had grassroots origins. And so a lot of it is us finding things that we’ve used in our own personal research lives, or our positions as teachers or research assistants, and compiling all of those together to make something that would work for us.

So our journal workflows are connected intimately to the way that we’ve structured the repository on the Commons. At each of those stages that you’re mentioning, like when an author submits a draft of a paper, or when we do a first round of copyediting, or when we receive an author’s comments back on our copy edit, we have a folder in the repository for each journal collection that collects the paper at that stage.

So 00 is when we get a paper from an author, and 09 is the published version, and there are folders everywhere in between. What this has helped us to do is trace the evolution of a paper over time. It allows us to see how peer review or comments are integrated. It allows us to see how our edits are being accepted by the author. It allows us to see how the page proofs come together.

So it has helped us to do that. And then we supplement using the HSS Commons with tools like Trello, which is a wonderful project management visual suite that allows us to trace these papers as they move through.

And so those two work in tandem to help us keep track of everything as it goes through. As well as that issue of version control that I talked about earlier, this really alleviates that problem.

Sajib: Excellent. Thank you so much. I think you actually answered my next question. That’s fine. I mean, you answered both the question that I asked and the question that I was going to ask next, which was related to what particular features of the HSS Commons have been most valuable.

Would you like to add anything more if I asked you that question? Is there any particular feature of the HSS Commons—you already talked about many features—that you would like to highlight for other editors who are probably considering or thinking of switching to the HSS Commons, or who could be attracted to use the HSS Commons because of its openness and its versatility regarding collaborative efforts?

Lindsey: Yeah. I think the two tools that we certainly rely on the most are the ability to create projects and then, under those projects, to create the repository. I think that for folks who are doing similar kinds of journal work, or if you’re working on any kind of collaborative research project, I would imagine that those two would become real lifelines for you.

Like I mentioned earlier, the project space being collaborative was huge for us because we are never working individually. At the very least, there are two of us involved. Oftentimes, it’s more than five people involved. So the ability to have everyone in one space is very useful for the work that we do.

And then the repository function is great because it becomes a shared space where everyone knows the materials are going to be. And of course, there are tools like that that do this in a myriad of ways. But we found that the organization function of the Commons and the storage function of the Commons really worked for us with what we needed, in terms of cataloging or indexing the items that are coming through IDEAH.

Sajib: Thank you. Those are great suggestions for some of the existing editors or other editors who may consider the HSS Commons. Now I have another follow-up question here, which is: when you are using the HSS Commons and interacting with different stakeholders like the author, the peer reviewer, you as the editor, and maybe there is also a publisher, how do you think the HSS Commons is helping build a community through your journal?

Lindsey: This is a really interesting question. Through the journal, we tend to work mostly with the people who are in the editing stage.

So our authors and peer reviewers are not invited into the project space specifically. Rather, it is myself, our managing editor, and then, if there are special issue editors, they are involved as well. This is mostly because some of the documents that we’re putting in there have to do with peer review, and we keep that double-blind peer review through the IDEAH journal. But I do think it’s been fun for me to look back at all of the projects that we have. At this point, it almost runs the length of the journal’s ten years. So we have almost all of the collections as projects through the HSS Commons.

And it’s really interesting for me to see the folks who were involved as editors at various stages. Then maybe a couple of years later, we receive a paper from them as an author, or maybe after they edit, they choose to be a peer reviewer. So this might be a particular vantage point that’s afforded to me because I can see that dashboard in completion.

But it makes me feel really proud and excited that the journal has cultivated this group of people where it doesn’t seem very often like someone is coming into IDEAH as an author, editor, or peer reviewer, and then they exit the community. It feels like a lot of these folks enter through one of those pathways, and then they stay and function in a different role in some way.

You know, they decide they want to pay it forward and be a peer reviewer after getting peer reviews, or something like that. So I think that spaces like the Commons sort of facilitate or prop up community in that way by giving us an ability to understand community or see it in a way that maybe we would miss if we didn’t have a platform like this.

Sajib: Great. Thank you. I’m glad to know that the use of the HSS Commons, as well as the path of IDEAH and the development of IDEAH, is helping build a community. And the HSS Commons is kind of a partner in that journey.

So, the next question I would like to ask you is: based on your experience as an editor and journal leader, what improvements or additional features would make the HSS Commons more effective for this kind of scholarly publishing?

Lindsey: I think maybe something that would help us is if this could be streamlined all the way through to publishing on our dissemination platform. At this point, we use the Commons in everything before we publish. And we have a particular relationship with Érudit in terms of disseminating the journal. And so it works at some point to just transfer over.

But it would be really cool if at some point everything was well integrated the whole way through. Similarly, we host all of our peer review stuff off of the Commons. Like I said, to help with the double-blind function, but maybe at some point there’s an ability to build that kind of feature into the Commons that would allow us to do that kind of work on the site.

So instead of just using it to trace our backend, it could be a little bit more like a full-service suite for the journal. That’s very blue-sky and very selfish. But maybe those would be the things.

Sajib: No, those are great suggestions. I really would like to thank you for bringing those up because I will be able to pass those suggestions to our development team so that we can work on them.

There have been a lot of things that are currently being developed, which we will see in the future. And, thinking about all the different communities that are involved with the HSS Commons, we are trying to make those improvements.

You are always welcome, and anybody is always welcome, to send suggestions to our team anytime because we have been actively working on improvements.

So, we are kind of at the end of the questions that I wanted to ask, but the very last—an additional question, maybe—I would like to ask you is: as you have mentioned, you have to switch to a different platform at the end of the process of publishing an article through IDEAH. You also probably know that the HSS Commons itself gives the opportunity to publish directly through the HSS Commons. So, what do you think the HSS Commons can do to help or facilitate the publication of articles from different journals directly on the HSS Commons? Do you have any suggestions for the HSS Commons to be able to host publications?

Lindsey: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t know if I have a super well-formulated answer now. Maybe a lot of it would be just getting the word out about that function to already established journals. And maybe there are some people who are publishing on self-hosted platforms who would be interested in shifting to publishing on the Commons if that was a feature that they knew of or that was available. I know we have had, as a journal, our own journey through finding the ways to publish the scholarship. And we eventually landed at a perfect home for us. But there could be folks who are midway through that point where the Commons would be the perfect home for them. So yeah, small startup journals, grassroots journals, teaching journals generally—that’s the community of people that is up on the Commons. So it could be a lovely fit for folks who are doing that kind of work.

Sajib: Excellent. Thank you so much. So that means we need to reach out to people, or we need to let people know that this is a service that is available if anybody wants to use it.

So yeah. That’s kind of the end of my questions. Now, if you have anything else to add, feel free to do so.

Lindsey: Yeah. No, this has been great. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about the Commons.

If folks are interested in IDEAH and reading some of the various wonderful articles that we have published, you can find us through Érudit, where we’ve just published our most recent issue in June of 2026.

Also, if folks are looking to read back issues of the journal, we’ve been publishing for about six years now. If you search our social media, which is IDEAH Journal on Bluesky and on Instagram, you can find links to back issues of our articles there.

Sajib: Thank you so much, Dr. Lindsey, for your time and for talking to us about the HSS Commons. It was a lovely conversation.

Lindsey: My pleasure. Fantastic.

Sajib: Thank you!