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The University Writing Center (UWrite): H-Net - Humanities and Social Sciences Online

What is H-Net?

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net) is an independent, non-profit scholarly association that offers an open academic space for scholars, teachers, advanced students and related professionals. Built around an online system of networks moderated by certified editors, H-Net is uniquely situated to encourage technological innovation in the humanities and social sciences while safeguarding academic best practices.

The two PDFs below will help you better understand what H-Net does and show you how to engage with the platform.

H-Net Commons

The H-Net Commons is a platform that serves as the foundation for what many have called H-Net 2.0. The Commons is now home to 180 free online communities (Networks) edited by 300 volunteer field experts worldwide with approximately 200,000 subscribers, each network overseen by an advisory board of experts. H-Net's public archives date back to 1994, and as is the case with all of H-Net's content, they are freely accessible to the public. If you subscribe to H-Net subscribers, you are able to:

  • post images, audio, video, text
  • exchange discussion messages and receive them via email if they wish
  • view user profiles
  • customize their subscribed network content using a "My HNet" content widget
  • deliver pages via RSS feeds to their mailboxes or feed readers
  • create blogs and customize pages of links and other content
  • create content-based projects (image archives, a series of podcasts, a syllabus commons, etc.)
  • use private planning space for affiliated organizations
  • create content through a common web-based interface
  • search for material across H-Net that has been categorized and tagged by editors and users for easy retrieval, bookmarking, and saving dynamic searches to My HNet.

H-Net Videos

H-Net tutorial videos are available on their YouTube channel.