Video essay — 2022

This video provides an overview of the history of digital knowledge commons, as well as some of the challenges facing today's digital knowledge commons and academic social networking sites. These challenges include the enclosure or commercialization of commons; the exploitation of researchers and research data; and the exclusion of certain people from digital spaces. It concludes with a brief discussion of how not-for-profit digital knowledge commons such as the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons are working to address these challenges.

Author: Graham Jensen

Presentation — 2022

So much of the contemporary discourse around open scholarly infrastructures still seems dependent on an ethic of "if you build it they will come," even though we know from the history of print cultures that authority, trust, and value are hard-won qualities that are underpinned by dynamic political, social, cultural, and economic work. This contribution examines the ways we think about scale, scarcity, and prestige in both online and print contexts. In the last decade, Scholarly Commons have emerged as a particular intervention in the struggle for and against platform dominance in contemporary scholarly communications. To what extent do these interventions work counter to print-capitalist models, and how can then effectively facilitate open social scholarship?

Authors: John Maxwell and Beatrice Glickman

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: DHSI

Presentation — 2022

The library, the archive, social media, and the city are all spaces in which people experience serendipity: the incidental discovery of valuable information. Humanities and social science scholars reap the benefits of these ‘a-ha’ moments during their daily working lives, from the computer screen to the hallways at conferences, and often put these discoveries down to chance. However, the connection made during the experience of serendipity is up to the individual scholar to realize, making these occurrences less ones of chance, and more so the result of years of knowledge accumulation and recognition of connections to one’s own work.  The HSS Commons is a meeting space where these scholars can connect and share their knowledge widely, with and beyond their own academic communities, and as a result, is an online environment rife with possibilities for serendipity. This talk will focus on a few affordances which members might wish to cultivate for themselves as the commons blossoms into a space for sharing, community, and cross-fertilization.

Author: Kim Martin

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: DHSI

Presentation — 2022

The journey of our relationship with the Digital Commons has fundamentally changed and continues to shape the way we consider support and partnership for national cloud-based research projects in the Compute Canada Federation. Whether they be in or outside Humanities and Social Sciences. We will share these changes and the way that we are committing to support the Digital Commons and its launch. We will also discuss the context of a substantial transition period and time of change at the Compute Canada Federation, and how through that, we intend to support the Digital Commons and other projects like it in the future.

Authors: John Simpson and Lydia Vermeyden

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: INKE Partnership Meeting

Presentation — 2022

As we work to transform higher education, making our institutions more inclusive, more just, and more generous in their relationships with constituencies both on- and off-campus, we must also consider the roles that our ways of working with our communities of practice play in such transformation. This talk will explore the need for a scholarly communications infrastructure that is open-source, open-access, not-for-profit, and radically interoperable in order to facilitate the kinds of collaboration that can allow research and publishing to serve our highest goals and to function in accordance with our highest values.

Author: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Event: Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences: INKE Partnership Meeting

Presentation — 2021

Authors: Caroline Winter, Graham Jensen, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Ray Siemens

Conference: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2021: Research Data Management for Digitally Curious Humanists

Cite this work: Winter, C., Jensen, G., Arbuckle, A., & Siemens, R. (2021, June 14). RDM for the Large-Scale Research Commons. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oA5GBgPdNN40HIEyNvC4vPhR0ZUEFLfG

Presentation — 2021

Authors: Graham Jensen, Alyssa Arbuckle, Caroline Winter, Talya Jesperson, Ray Siemens

Conference: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2021: Conference & Colloquium

Jensen, G., Arbuckle, A., Winter, C., Jesperson, T., & Siemens, R. (2021, June 2). Fostering Digital Communities of Care: Safety, Security, and Trust in the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1olA92kJ7ibzHs7CII75qSDjnhHyV3Rxc/view?usp=sharing&usp=embed_facebook

Presentation — 2021

Authors: Alyssa Arbuckle, Graham Jensen, Luis Meneses, Ray Siemens, and Caroline Winter

Conference: Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (CSDH) 2021

Cite this work: Arbuckle, A., Jensen, G., Meneses, L., Siemens, R., & Winter, C. (2021, June). Reimagining the Digital Research Commons for the Canadian HSS Community. CSDH/SCHN 2021. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:38809/

Open, collaborative, digital scholarship is gaining increasing prominence in Canada and internationally. In our online world, the possibility to co-create and share knowledge across departmental, institutional, and social boundaries is more attainable than ever. A key endeavour of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership is to collaboratively develop the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons. The Canadian HSS Commons is a national-scale digital research commons that will connect HSS researchers in order to accelerate research, development, community building, and engagement across the broad spectrum of specialists and active non-specialists in Canada. This talk will provide an update on the Canadian HSS Commons, with a focus on how this initiative can foster open social scholarship for humanities and social sciences practitioners.

Authors: Ray Siemens and Alyssa Arbuckle

Conference: Engaging Open Social Scholarship 2020

Password for content: #EngagingOSS

Cite this work: Arbuckle, A., & Siemens, R. (2020, December). The Canadian HSS Commons as an Open Social Scholarship Tool [Recorded lightning talk]. Engaging Open Scholarship. https://inke.ca/engaging-open-social-scholarship/lightning-talks/

Recorded panel discussion — 2020

Co-chaired by: Ray Siemens (UVic) and Alyssa Arbuckle (UVic)

Featuring: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Michigan State University), Gabriel Miller (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), Susan Haigh (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Clare Appavoo (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), and Chad Gaffield (U Ottawa)

Conference: Digital Humanities (DH) 2020

Cite this work: Siemens, R., & Arbuckle, A. (2020, July 20). Open, Digital Scholarship: Issues, Initiatives, and Research Commons in the Humanities and Social Sciences [Recorded panel discussion]. DH 2020. https://inke.ca/videos/OpenDigitalScholarshipPanel_07-20-20.mp4

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

Cite this work: Caroline Winter, Tyler Fontenot, Luis Meneses, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, The ETCL and INKE Research Groups, 2020. "Foundations for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons: Exploring the Possibilities of Digital Research Communities." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 2 (2020-10-31). https://www.popjournal.ca/issue02/winter