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 third 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 Constance Crompton. They are a white, queer, able-bodied settler and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. They direct the University of Ottawa’s Labo de données en sciences humaines/The Humanities Data Lab. They are a member of several research project teams: Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership, and the Transgender Media Portal.

Britt: Hello! I am so excited to connect today!

Constance: Hey Britt! Same!

So I thought I could begin by asking you about when you first started using the HSS Commons. 

I first started using Commons during some of the initial beta testing, when the Commons had just a few of its initial social features. I found it very useful in those early days. I was teaching at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), and we were using the Commons to share course packs and materials (e.g., https://hsscommons.ca/en/groups/dhsi21). I know it was handy for students, but I must say, I enjoyed it as an instructor as it allowed me to very easily see what others were doing in their courses – often teaching courses happens in silos, but this was open by design. There were definitely moments where I thought to myself, I wish I could take that class! 

I remember that too – I think that might have been when DHSI switched to being online for a year. I definitely wanted to take all of the courses, haha!

Would you mind sharing more about how you use or have used the Commons?

I think my most intensive use of the HSS Commons was to run conferences, and it has been excellent for that. For the larger of the two conferences I have run through the Commons, we were trying to figure out how to promote and share information about the event—whether to set up a WordPress site or something else—but neither of the  two universities partnering on the conference provided that kind of hosting. The Commons turned out to be the perfect solution.

Example of conference page

What made it especially useful was how event-centric it is. We could list all the public conference events in the Commons calendar, but we could also have pages for registration, keynotes, and local information—like things to do in Ottawa, restaurant recommendations, accommodations, etc. It was really helpful to have everything nested in one place, especially since there is so much adjacent stuff when it comes to running conferences. I also liked that it was easy to collaborate with people from other universities—many already had Commons logins, and we could assign different admin roles depending on what people needed to do. We also had a few research meetings at the conference and were glad of the Commons’ social features to keep the conversation going after everyone went home.

Wow! And this is all in addition to your profile page…

Yes, but actually, I haven't uploaded my publications to the HSS Commons repository yet! (Shhhh…) This is mainly just due to my own busy-ness and publications management. 

That’s funny! But you know it’s there, which is important… I should mention that the HSS Commons currently enables users to login with and connect their ORCID iDs to their profile, which can help with importing publications. 

Oooh! I have big thoughts about ORCID. First, it might be helpful to know that ORCID stands for “Open Researcher and Contributor ID.” It’s managed by a non-profit group that “strives to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities” (About ORCID).

I honestly think the ORCID integration is a superpower feature of the HSS Commons. It’s incredibly useful. Even beyond login—which I find delightful, because not needing a separate Commons login is a small joy—it’s the data “slurping” that’s really powerful.

I’m especially excited about the move toward two-way integration. Being able to push data back and forth means the Commons isn’t just using ORCID, it’s participating in the broader, non-commercial Linked Data web. That’s significant—it connects to efforts to create a linked data representation of academic identity, which is crucial for disambiguation and discoverability.

Also, I just want to say: This kind of infrastructure—single sign-on, linked data, interoperability—is what helps build a sustainable, open scholarly web. The HSS Commons is actually helping fulfill the promise of linked data in practice, which I love. 

Not everyone gets as excited about ORCID as me. For some, it just seems like another profile page—like Academia.edu—but it's so much more than that. ORCID is important infrastructure that is critical to the future of how we represent ourselves not only to one another on the web, but for how machines can understand the real world. As Susan Brown, at the University of Guelph says, linked data turns the whole web into a distributed database, and through ORCID, we can make records about ourselves in that web-wide database that aren’t controlled by Google, Facebook, or other commercial actors .  

One of the real draws here is academic autonomy, portability, and stability. If you change institutions, your ORCID and HSS Commons can travel with you, just update your affiliations. Or, if your institution is taking things down off of the internet, you have this repository space available. 

We need tools and infrastructural projects like the HSS Commons who actually take on the work that comes with developing a robust, non-commercial digital / internet space—beyond commercial platforms, beyond the fragility of institutional systems, and independent of where you work. The more tools like the HSS Commons that integrate and draw on it, the more we are building an ecosystem that is not dependent on any one institution, university, or commercial enterprise.

It’s awesome to hear you talk about ORCID, because I don't know that much about it personally, and I think the little explainer you've given here is really useful! Where can people who are interested in this topic go to learn more?

Sure, ORCID has an explainer that people may be interested in perusing. ORCID’s About page also does a good job of introducing those who may be new to the idea. 

Are there any other features we haven’t mentioned yet that you’ve found useful or are curious about?

Oh! Yes. I remember how, for the online conference we organized, we used HSS Commons to circulate participants’ papers in a private space ahead of time. This allowed everyone to read and comment on each other’s work before we met live—which was essential given we were spread across time zones, from South Africa to Australia. When we came together on Zoom, we could skip the basic introductions and dive straight into deeper discussion. Even better, we could continue the conversation by feeding insights from the live session back into the comments and discussions on HSS Commons. This actually meant we created a lasting record of how we engaged with each other’s work, both in writing and in real time.

This particular conference, organized with Ray Siemens, Laura Estill, and Richard Lane, eventually became the foundation for an edited collection. What made it special was how different it felt from the usual edited volume process. Typically, authors don’t see each other’s chapters or feedback—everything goes through the editors. But in this case, the contributors could engage with one another directly. As editors, that engagement helped us shape the volume more thoughtfully—including how we ordered chapters and wrote introductions that reflected the actual conversations authors were having. It felt more like a collaborative community, not just a sequence of isolated contributions from authors who only know the editors, but don’t know one another. So in hindsight, while we called it a ‘conference,’ it was also a kind of social workflow—the kernel that fed into an edited collection that felt like it took a more human and communal approach to developing an edited volume. HSS Commons might not have been designed with that specific use case in mind, but it really worked for us. 

Wow. That’s super exciting, especially because one of the aims of the Commons isn’t just to be a repository, but to actually enable the kinds of conversations you’re describing that lead to collaborative projects—like edited collections! Before we sign off, is there anything that you think people might want to know about the HSS Commons?

I must say, when I go to the homepage, one of the things I really like—especially now, with the fracturing of social media and everyone being on different platforms—is that the Commons has this sort of one-size-fits-all quality about it. Like, I know I can go there and look for datasets, conference materials, podcasts, journal articles, and more, all in one place. That ‘one-stop’ aspect is really appealing.

As you can probably tell, I’m a collaborative person—I believe in the power of associations. So the idea of being able to see what different academic associations and societies are doing, and having a shared space where we can find common ground, is really valuable. It’s a lot better than everything being scattered—like this info's on a WordPress site over here, this other one is behind a paywall, or that resource is available but you have to know the URL for the author’s lab website.

That’s where I think the real potential of HSS Commons lies: to support both individual associations and cross-pollination between them. It creates space for community, connection, and lifting each other up—helping us know what others are doing. Because when we’re atomized, we’re not as strong as when we’re together.

Also, something I’d really like to use the Commons for is teaching project management—especially in courses where students are doing digital humanities work. When we’re building something like a map or a network analysis, we need not only a place to publish that work publicly with proper context, but also tools for managing the project behind the scenes. The Commons offers both: a forward-facing platform for sharing student scholarship, and backend tools like Gantt charts, timelines, and user role management. These aren’t always visible, but they’re central to how projects actually get made—and I see real potential in using the Commons to teach those skills. 

Example of the ‘to-do’ feature in a project

Asana is too much for a 12 week course! Especially if you just want to teach some of the foundational things about project management.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to chat with me and share how you’ve used the HSS Commons before. 

Anytime! 

1. HSS Commons in Practice