This talk introduces the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, which is an in-development community-governed digital research infrastructure designed to support open scholarship for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public (https://hsscommons.ca). As an initiative of the INKE Partnership (https://inke.ca/) developed with project partners in Canada, Australia, and the United States, the HSS Commons arose from the recognition that existing commercial academic networking platforms and proprietary repositories are insufficient in supporting the ethical collaborative and multilingual practices that characterize much humanities research. In response, the HSS Commons 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.
Taking the HSS Commons as a case study in value-driven infrastructure, this talk demonstrates how digital research environments are not neutral containers for scholarship but active agents that shape research practices, participation, and visibility. The talk will use the Commons’ engagement of a few Canadian early modern studies associations in Canada as examples to describe ways in which the HSS Commons facilitate open scholarship with emerging digital research infrastructure and research data management best practices. Meanwhile, the talk will also highlight two design commitments guiding the project—community governance and multilingualism—as it is reflected in the ongoing translation initiatives and community-building efforts with national and international partnerships.
First, following the Principles of Open Infrastructure, HSS Commons is structured around the core value of care (Winter 2020, Nowviskie 2015) in the organization of sustainable, non-commercial knowledge commons. Community governance is incorporated as a design principle that informs platform architecture and policy decisions to facilitate non-discriminatory participation in an open yet secure digital environment. Second, and relatedly, HSS Commons takes multilingualism seriously as an infrastructural concern rather than an optional enhancement. While humanities research frequently engages with local languages and culturally specific archives, digital infrastructures often default to English, limiting the circulation and visibility of non-Anglophone scholarship. HSS Commons addresses this imbalance by embedding multilingual considerations into its development. This talk will briefly discuss the Common’s community-led translation workflows in building multilingual interfaces that support the creation, dissemination, and discovery of scholarship in four other languages including French, Spanish, Bangla, Portuguese. The Commons is also currently working on translating its interface into Mandarin Chinese.
The talk concludes by reflecting on the implications of the work of HSS Commons for future DH research environments, suggesting that attention to governance and language is essential to assessing the long-term value and impact of digital infrastructure in the humanities.
Keywords: Digital Infrastructure, governance, multilingualism