A condensed workshop offering of the longer Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) course: https://dhsi.org/dhsi-2022-workshops/#open-knowledge-commons.

Knowledge commons and academic social networking sites such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate have grown enormously in the last decade, enabling millions of researchers to share information and connect with others in digital spaces. These platforms can help researchers produce, publish, and share research within and beyond their existing academic networks using sharing features that are familiar to users of popular commercial social networking sites such as Facebook. However, their growth also raises important questions about privacy, the privatization and exploitation of researchers and research data, and community governance, among others. In this course, we will examine how open knowledge commons, in particular, address these questions in both theory and practice. After a brief discussion of these issues in relation to the history and evolution of knowledge commons, participants will be guided through hands-on explorations of open, not-for-profit platforms including Humanities Commons and the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons. Participants will also be given time to freely experiment with these platforms—and the knowledge mobilization opportunities they provide—in consultation with guest experts and instructors.