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 first 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 Alan Colin-Arce, a graduate student (MA Sociology, University of Victoria) and research assistant at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. Alan’s research interests include web archiving, postcolonial digital humanities, and digital pedagogy. He also collaborates in the digital humanities project Huellas Incómodas--a digital archive that collects images of feminist activism in Latin America. 

Britt: Hi Alan! Thanks for agreeing to chat with me about your experience with using the Canadian HSS Commons. I guess a good place to start is with when you started using the Commons. Can you share a bit about that?

Alan: I started using the Commons about two years ago, when I started working at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. When I started using it was earlier on in its development, so it only had an English version available. Since then, I've used it for a lot of things because I have tested many of the new functions of the site. 

I have used the Commons to share slides for conferences. So when people ask me where they can get the slides, I tell them they are available on the Commons. Because the slides can be assigned a DOI when they are posted to the Commons repository, it is very easy to link to them from other places. 

I also use the CV function to have a CV attached to my profile and the groups function to share files with other people.

Example of the CV function.

Neat! Can you tell me more about how you use the Commons? For instance, you mentioned using it to share slides ahead of a conference (and after).

I think it’s a pretty good way of sharing slides. Before I used Figshare for sharing the slides, but that site is for-profit. I like that the Commons is more open. When I first joined the Commons, there was no way of previewing the files you uploaded, but now you can. So, it is even more convenient because you don't necessarily have to download the files to see what the slides or PDFs are about.

True! What other features have you used?
 
I have used the groups feature for my work at the lab [Electronic Textual Cultures Lab], for managing and keeping a record of all the publications we have. I think large labs sometimes have a hard time keeping track of all their activities, not only journal articles but also presentations, short papers, etc., but the groups feature in the Commons is a good way to account for all the work a large research group does.

I also think it can be a helpful feature for conferences to encourage online discussions and to share files among the attendees. We did this at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in the past couple of years and I believe it went well. Before, you could only access the course materials of the class you registered for and there were some issues when sending them with the attendees. After using the Commons it became easier to share and access the materials of all the classes in the conference.

You've used the Commons for two years and, in that time, have seen it grow. Has your usage shifted or changed in response?

I have seen more people joining the Commons, which is exciting because the more people that join, the more helpful and valuable it can become for researchers and students. I also find that the Commons can be a good place to share things I have written for classes or work in progress.

For example, a couple of years ago I was working on a project about web archiving and I realized that there were very few web archives in Spanish. So I used the Commons to create a collection that listed all the web archives in Spanish that I knew about so that I didn’t lose them but also for this list to be available to other people. It’s kind of like the bookmarks function of the browser but you can share them with other people and you don’t lose them if you use another device.

A Collection created on the Canadian HSS Commons

The collections feature is definitely something I want to try now too.
Have you had experiences with people engaging with your work on the Commons? Or is it just knowing that it's out there is kind of helpful?
 
It's been mostly knowing that it's out there—to know that if I ever need to view the slides I used in a conference or share a few websites with someone I can point them to the Commons.
 
Any other features or key core features do you find the most useful?

The repository to share all kinds of publications, the CV function, the blog posts occasionally. I also like that you can log in using ORCID, that way you don’t have to remember a new account and password. It’s also more private than using Facebook or Google to log in. You can also import to the Commons the publications you have on ORCID, which is helpful to avoid having to manually add your publications.

Anything else you'd want to add, or anything else you think people might want to know about the Commons?

While the Commons is more oriented toward individual users, the Commons can also be helpful for journals or for academic organizations. For example, I created a collection of digital humanities projects that had been reviewed in the Early Modern Digital Review journal. I think that was a nice way of showing all the projects that they had reviewed in a more visually appealing way than just a list because it has the links and screenshots of the project websites.

A collection created for a journal on the HSS Commons

For students, using the repository to share papers written for a class if you’re proud of them, but are not necessarily thinking of expanding them, could be helpful—especially since we can sometimes spend a lot of time working on papers for classes. It is also good for having an academic online presence without having to spend too much time building it.

I also think the translations of the interface into French, Spanish, and now Bangla are very important work. I studied my undergrad in Mexico and some of my classmates had a hard time using academic tools if they did not have a version in Spanish, so it’s great that the Commons is not only accessible for English-speakers, but that there is an effort to include users in other languages.

Bonus question! Do you plan to use the Commons in any way for your thesis, like disseminating or sharing or otherwise?

Maybe! It might be helpful for sharing some of my code or the tables I have in my results section. Some of them are quite long, so they might be easier to navigate using the preview shown in the Commons than in a Word or PDF file.

Thanks Alan!

Thanks Britt!

1. HSS Commons in Practice