About the HSS Research Showcase
HSS Research Showcase is a community-oriented, data-driven website that is designed to help researchers, the public, staff, and anyone else find their way through the hundreds of research projects and activities in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University. There’s lots going on and finding people to chat and collaborate with is even more trying in the age of remote work and teaching; it’s hard to know who is working on what.
The site collates the Faculty’s research themes with ongoing projects and departments and lets users move through them in any way they wish using Tags, researcher’s names, or links to the themes and departments themselves. Each project page contains a list of researchers, Tags, a brief abstract of the project, and links to project websites, social media, and researcher’s own pages. If you’d like to learn more on particulars of the showcase, please see the navigate and contribute pages.
Showcase Components
Projects
Projects in the Showcase are discrete, scholarly endeavours that are bound by either a distinct objective or output, such as a publication or a piece of academic work like a creation, performance, or graduate thesis or paper, or which produces a series of related works around a sustained theme or question. It can be, but isn’t necessarily, contiguous with a research grant or graduate program. A project could last years or just a short while, depending on the nature of the intellectual work and the objectives. It might be associated with a single research grant or it could include several, or none at all. The important thing is that it is defined as a coherent and fairly contained scholarly pursuit.
New projects can be added once you’ve logged in and completed a user profile in the dashboard.
People
Our research community is diverse and broad; it includes not only academic staff members and permanent faculty but students, staff members, as well as adjunct, contractual, and retired faculty members. While faculty and students interact in formal academic programs, they’re all members of this greater intellectual community. Many of our students are leaders and experts in research areas in their own right and at the same time, our faculty researchers are also learners setting out into new areas of research and scholarly work. The Showcase is designed to allow the various research projects of our researchers to be front and center at whatever stage of their academic or scholarly career, regardless their formal position within the University.
Tags
Each project is tagged with keywords that describe and situate its interests, activities, and disciplinary context. You can use these Tags to navigate through the website; each has its own mini-showcase where projects and researchers with the same Tags are collated into one place.
Themes, Departments, & Archives
We’ve created mini-showcases to help you navigate which projects and researchers are either affiliated with an HSS Department or Archive, as well as those which fall into the new Research Themes being finalized by the HSS Faculty Council. These mini-showcases are intended to help users and researchers find out what’s going on either in their home departments or to view projects by administrative units or categorizations.
Design & Implementation
The Showcase is an initiative of HSS Research Support Services under the direction of Associate Dean, Dr. Tana Allen. Dr. Matthew Milner drafted the design and implementation using the static website building engine, Jekyll. The theme is a modified fork (reworking) of the Jekflix theme by Thiago Rossener (see https://github.com/thiagorossener/jekflix-template).
About Jekyll
Jekyll is a light-weight, open-source, static website building engine which runs off of Ruby. It parses markdown (.md) files, used in platforms like wikis and wikipedia, and light-weight YAML datafiles to create content-rich but easily maintainable sites for a range of uses. It is a common replacement for Wordpress and is highly adaptable. For more information on Jekyll, visit https://jekyllrb.com/.