Reimagining the Digital Research Commons for the Canadian HSS Community

Building on foundational research about the historical and intellectual roots of the digital research commons (Winter et al. 2020), this paper examines the Canadian HSS Commons from a DH perspective, focusing on how it will meet the needs of Canadian researchers working within the highly collaborative, methodologically diverse, and exploratory domain of the digital humanities. We take the self-reflexive stance of the digital humanities to critically examine the metaphor of the commons as applied to an open, virtual space and to intellectual resources. We conclude that acknowledging the present-day challenges involved in implementing this ideal––and resisting the social, economic, and institutional pressures that have historically threatened to transform such spaces into sites of exclusion rather than inclusion––will allow us to reimagine the commons as a virtual, open, collaborative space for creating and sharing information. Authors: Graham Jensen, Caroline Winter, Alyssa Arbuckle, Luis Meneses, and Ray Siemens (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, University of Victoria) Session: The Work of DH See attached files for the full text of our paper (also available in CORE here: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cgc0-ss92) as well as the our slides (also available here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xkEIQOeyWmKb0A74RrOKBajU3N2JH1iw/edit#slide=id.p5).