The Digital Humanities Summer Institute invites you to participate in an online workshop on the Humanities and Social Sciences Commons (HSS Commons; https://hsscommons.ca/), followed by a feedback session related to your experiences with different online platforms for sharing your research and scholarship and your perception of the HSS Commons in the context of other platforms you may use.

The HSS Commons is an academic social networking site that allows you to, among other things, create and disseminate your research, connect with other scholars, collaborate on projects and with groups, and create and promote events. Serving as a hub for open social scholarship, it combines elements of social networking sites, tools for collaboration, and institutional repositories, allowing researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. The HSS Commons is an initiative of the INKE Partnership, with project partners in Canada and reaching around the globe; INKE work focuses on open, social scholarship: academic practice that enables the creation, sharing, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways.

The workshop will take place Tuesday, July 9, at 12-1:30PM Pacific (3PM Eastern/2PM Central/1PM Mountain Time) on Zoom (login with authenticated Zoom account required to join): https://illinois.zoom.us/j/88449507370?pwd=wNHMJ4JaMxk4bk0UaJDeZcakfR4r3Q.1

Your feedback in the workshop and feedback session will be part of research led by Daniel Tracy, Head of Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the University of Illinois Library, and Graham Jensen, Assistant Director and Mitacs Accelerate / INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, University of Victoria. The feedback session portion will take the form of a focus group and will be recorded. This research may be disseminated through research articles and conference presentations, or similar types of research reports and public reporting of the research. Your participation will help to improve the HSS Commons, and could benefit you and your research community if you continue to use the site. The study will also contribute to general understanding of contemporary needs for open scholarship platforms and how they fit into the different ways scholars share their work with one another and the public. There are no risks to participation beyond those that exist in everyday life.

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you at this open online DHSI event!

Dan Tracy and Graham Jensen
University of Illinois IRB Review Board #IRB24-0431
University of Victoria Research Protocol #24-0132

If you have any questions about this study please contact Daniel Tracy at 217-300-8439 or dtracy@illinois.edu. If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant in the study, please contact the University of Illinois Institutional Review Board at 217-333-2670 or via email at irb@illinois.edu; or the University of Victoria Human Research Ethics office at 250-472-4545 or via email at ethics@uvic.ca.

1. canadian HSS commons
2. digital humanities
3. open access