Platypus

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 solution to this problem: ElasticPress-BuddyPress. Continue reading “Implementing Global Search & Personalized Suggestions for the 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.

Continue reading “Claiming Space on Humanities Commons“

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 the crowd was about 4000:1 pro-science, it wasn’t exactly a challenge). We on the Humanities Commons team were of course aware of the proposed plans to shutdown the NEH and NEA, so when Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggested we mark Endangered Data Week by archiving all the white papers that have originated from grants issued by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, I was immediately intrigued. Continue reading “Doing What You Can”

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 we have never reconsidered in the months of experimenting since. Continue reading “Afterimages: Hosting an Online Exhibition on the Commons”

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 a monograph wasn’t going to be an option). And as I’ve continued to work outside the academy, and the focus of my research has shifted from 19^th-century French literature to scholarly communication, the kind of outputs I create have shifted too, towards what is often deemed “grey” literature: white papers, blog posts, reports. Humanities Commons allows me to express that shift with a holistic profile that represents not two (or more) discrete periods in my life, but a continuum of evolving humanities expertise. Continue reading “Sharing All the Scholarly Things”

Continue reading “Community, Not Clicks”

A core value for me, as a scholar, is the open exchange of ideas—among scholars and among the public. Implementing this value requires access and transparency. As gratified as I’ve been, over the past decade or so, to see the growth of open-access publication and the democratized dissemination of knowledge, I have been increasingly dismayed at the financial motives and quality of many of the platforms that have emerged. Importantly, I have been concerned about the inequalities they elide and, at times, contribute to. Continue reading “Teaching and Learning with the Commons”