The steady increase in membership on Humanities Commons since launch was been very gratifying for the small staff developing and maintaining the network. We started with a strong base of nearly 6,000 MLA Commons members, but began registering members immediately and have seen a steady flow of new members since launch.
Members of HC identify Title and Organization at registration. We do not validate either entry against a defined list which makes sorting and counting difficult, but we’ve identified some common keywords that let us count all but about 2,000 entries. When Humanities Commons launched in late 2016 the membership was primarily faculty and grad students.
Over the last 3 years, we’ve seen an increase in the types of members attracted to the platform.
HC members are affiliated with almost 6,000 unique institutions and organizations, but a large percentage (27%) of members are from this list of 100 institutions and organizations.
Top Member Affiliations
CORE Growth
Deposits into CORE have been strong ever since Humanities Commons launched. At that point the were less than 500 deposits in CORE, we have averaged almost 3,000 a year since.
Article is by far the most common item type deposited with over 3,500 in CORE, but we are seeing an increase in the item types in use. The two charts that follow show the most common deposit item types at the time.
Finally, we’ve seen our members interests evolve as groups are created and grow. Earlier this year we had two student interns spend a week with the Gephi visualization tool and some anonymized network graph data. By using the Modularity statistic to identify communities based on connections, our interns were able to surface interesting clusters of groups with shared interestes. The results give us a different way to look at what Humanities Commons is and point to new ways we can engage and support our members.
Congratulations from Japan, and thank you for the interesting report.
The Profile has allowed me to show my range of genres and explorations
with 47 CORE deposits in 17 item types, at
https://hcommons.org/members/stevemccartyinjapan
while the Sites function made it easier than needed for a techie to make a homepage site, where running your cursor over topics shows the subcategories:
https://japanned.hcommons.org
For many years I was concerned that being a Japanologist in Japan was like shipping coals to Newcastle, while I saw that Japan scholars abroad never committed themselves to publicly writing in Japanese like like I have done so much. So I expanded to studies in bilingualism, language teaching especially with technology, and founded the World Association for Online Education (WAOE) in 1998, an academic NPO registered in Sacramento, California. The Internet brought my knowledge of Japan to many inquirers, and then I was called upon to lecture for the government, introducing Japan to developing country officials from around the world. So everything one learns turns out to have value, but, inhabiting the interstices or white expanses of your chart, sometimes I wonder if many Western colleagues are taking notice.
I’m quite pleased with this site and have had questions answered. Now with 61 CORE contributions in 22 genres, I find that there have been about 3,000 downloads, and probably many more views of the explanatory pages, so it has been worthwhile, even if I could not get to know you all.