Birthday

• HC User Spotlight: Luís Henriques

  Luís Henriques is a musicologist and PhD candidate at the University of Évora. In this special birthday-edition HC User Spotlight, he reflects on how he has used CORE (over 250 deposits!) and sites hosted on the Commons to share his work. I joined the Humanities Commons community in early 2017. The platform had launched in…

• Building Community

  When we launched Humanities Commons three years ago, our user base consisted of the 5,000-ish pre-existing members of MLA Commons. With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we expanded the network to include Commons sites for our first-round pilot partners, CAA, AJS, and ASEEES. Perhaps most importantly, though, we also opened the Humanities…

• Working Together and Making Connections

  Humanities Commons is a great resource for MLA members and folks from all over the humanities. At the MLA, for example, forums are using the Commons to organize mentoring among their membership—matching up graduate students and untenured faculty members with folks who are happy to share their own experience and advice.

• Creating Spaces for Collaboration

  Humanities Commons has been an inspiration for us at Northeastern University. With a growing global campus network, and with numerous interdisciplinary initiatives and an active spirit of collaboration at the university, we adopted the Humanities Commons model and underlying software to enable and encourage the kinds of interactions we think will greatly improve higher education.

• Implementing Global Search & Personalized Suggestions for the Commons

  Humanities Commons is powered by WordPress, and its social features like groups and member profiles depend on BuddyPress. Because of the way groups and members are stored in the database, there was no easy way for users to search all the content on the site in a single interface. Earlier this year we implemented a…

• Claiming Space on Humanities Commons

    I joined the Humanities Commons team as community manager at the end of May. I had moved through a handful of university posts within a few years–as a graduate student, a postdoc, and an adjunct–so I recognized the particular value of Humanities Commons for people who have temporary, contingent, multiple, or no academic institutional affiliations.

• Doing What You Can

  It’s only been a year? It seems like two—yet there is one moment since the launch of Humanities Commons that stands out in my memory as particularly rewarding. Like many, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about access to data. I followed the Data Refuge events last spring. I participated in the March for Science in Princeton (since…

• Afterimages: Hosting an Online Exhibition on the Commons

  Not long ago my colleague, Catherine Burdick, and I launched Afterimages, an online exhibition about the political graffiti that often stretches across the most prominent wall of Chile’s most iconic church. Selecting Humanities Commons as the project’s digital home was the first major conversation of our collaboration, and it remains one of the core decisions…

• Sharing All the Scholarly Things

  When I started my first non-academic job, I asked myself, “What am I going to do with my dissertation?” It seemed such a waste that I’d put so much time and effort into original research, only to have it languish behind the locked doors of my alma mater (finding the time to turn it into…

• Community, Not Clicks

  Among the unsettling and depressing lessons of the last year, the darker aspects of digital platforms has stood out. Online services that we have relied on for communication and that have portrayed themselves as jovial and chatty town squares have been unmasked as much grimmer places with legions of bad actors. Publishing and collaboration channels…