Fostering Digital Communities of Care: Safety, Security, and Trust in the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons

Today, academia's relationship with notions of care remains fraught: individual scholars, scholarly communities, and the larger institutions that support them have all profited from the affordances of digital technologies and platforms while also having to contend with the concomitant social challenges of digital scholarship.George Veletsianos, for instance, declares that "academia's uncomfortable relationship with care is evident in many of its foundational processes" (Social Media 80).To be a scholar in the twenty-first century is -as in preceding centuries-to be a networked scholar. 1 But digital scholarship has introduced entirely new possibilities and problems, requiring academic communities to consider what fostering care looks like, in theory and practice, as the technologies mediating networks of researchers and research data continue to evolve.This paper invites further consideration of care in the networked world vis-à-vis the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development research platform by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership. 2 Building on the work of Caroline Winter et al. ("Foundations"), we examine how open digital research commons can encourage responsible community-building and collaboration as two interrelated forms of care.In doing so, we draw on Bethany Nowviskie's interpretation of ethics or networks of care in accord with feminist thought-dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-that values "deep connection to others," and also in stark contrast to "economic systems that valorized a private profit motive and circumscribed the participation of women and the servile under-classes." 3 "A competitive capitalist marketplace," writes Nowviskie, "depends upon but does not assign much value to things we create through networks of reciprocity, compassion, generosity, mending, and care."In a sense, then, "care" in the larger historical and philosophical context described by Nowviskie, and adapted provisionally in this paper, might be understood as a diverse set of practices that are both community-minded and intensely opposed to systems or forms of interaction, including economic ones, that threaten the common good of those communities or the individuals that comprise them.Defined in this way, the concept of care-as a form of "deep connection" that is simultaneously at odds with "private profit motive[s]"-is highly relevant to discussions of digital spaces such as social networks and not-for-profit digital research commons intended to bring people together.Such platforms can help researchers freely produce, publish, and share research within and beyond their existing academic networks using sharing features that are at once familiar to users of popular commercial "academic social networking sites" (ASNS), yet frequently missing from "relatively siloed" institutional repositories (Fitzpatrick, "Academia"). Even so, while open research-sharing platforms such as the Canadian HSS Commons and the HumanitiesCommons-an academic platform for research-sharing and networking-provide exciting new possibilities for individual scholars and scholarly communities alike, their implementation also raises important questions about how digital knowledge environments can safeguard users and their work as yet another form of care in the sense(s) outlined above.At their core, these questions focus on how best to realize the high ideals excited by such spaces (e.g., openness and equitable access to information), especially in building communities of care around areas of inquiry, thoughts, and ideas.However, consideration of such questions also involves shifting IDEAH • Vol. 3, Iss.

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