CORPUS Publications

A New Way to Publish Research Data

CORPUS publishes online research data that is:

• Attributed to its authors, who determine what is published and work with the CORPUS staff to prepare the data for publication on the Web.
• Peer-reviewed and professionally edited, if the author submits a publication proposal that is accepted by the CORPUS editorial board, to ensure the quality and coherence of both the data and its mode of organization.
• Durable and stable over the long term with an institutional commitment that the data will remain accessible on the Web.
• Free and open-access for scholars and students to use for non-commercial academic purposes.
• Reliably citable as individual items of information at a high level of granularity via persistent URL hyperlinks.
• Reconfigurable and reusable as a set of database items that are not locked into static Web pages.   

Responding to a Pressing Need

CORPUS publications respond to the pressing need (no pun intended) for a reliable, institutionally supported, and editorially regulated venue for preserving and disseminating digital research data and creative digital works, with full control by authors of how their data is organized and which data is made public. The digital medium permits new ways of presenting and interacting with information, breaking the bonds of the printed codex.

It is often the case that the number of images and maps we wish to publish far exceeds what could be put into print, not to mention the impossibility of publishing audio and video data in a printed book. However, more than thirty years after the inception of the World Wide Web, many researchers still lack a satisfactory way to publish and cite digital data.

This is an acute problem in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, where research is usually conducted in small projects led by one or two collaborators, who construct idiosyncratic data sets using their own terminology. There is no single conceptual ontology that everyone shares.

Indeed, devising a new and better ontology is often a key aim of the research. But this inhibits the use of a common computer system for compiling the data and for publishing it, with the result that scholars rely on bespoke software and database structures tailored expensively for each project.

Financially Sustainable

Creating and maintaining new software for each project is not financially sustainable, as we have learned through painful experience. In most disciplines there is not enough funding available to upgrade each project’s idiosyncratic software indefinitely and keep the data accessible on the Web after the grant runs out or the project leader retires.

Sadly, most websites for research in the humanities eventually go dark and the data becomes inaccessible. And this is not just a problem in the humanities. The same problem is encountered in many fields of study, including the natural sciences, if there is no standardized ontology to which everyone could or should adhere.

CORPUS now solves this problem because the compilation and publication of data is done using a single, shared multi-ontology database platform that can handle the data of any project in any field of study while preserving each project’s ontology, i.e., its own idiosyncratic terminology and arrangement of data. This avoids the prohibitive expense of creating and maintaining new software for each project. CORPUS thus leverages economies of scale that allow it to produce durable, high-quality online publications in a financially sustainable way.

Institutionally Certified

Researchers in all fields of study now routinely create digital data in the course of their work, including texts, images, maps, data tables, and audio and video files. They labor long and hard to create digital representations of knowledge that are complex and conceptually nuanced, reflecting the interpretive issues and complexities in their area of research.

Understandably, researchers want this data to be made available on the Web in a durable and citable form for others to use. In many cases, they also want the digital materials on which they have expended considerable critical thought and effort to count for academic promotion, which implies some form of peer review and a certification of quality.

In response to this need, the CORPUS staff work with authors to produce peer-reviewed, professionally edited, and institutionally certified online publications under the imprint of the University of Chicago. These publications have ISBN numbers and are catalogued by libraries as any book would be.

Published data is displayed in dynamically generated websites with customizable user interfaces via a powerful Web app maintained by the CORPUS staff. A peer-reviewed publication will often belong to a CORPUS series, depending on the subject matter. Each series has its own default user interface design, which can be customized for a particular publication.

Open, Durable, and Citable

Published data is available free of charge for academic use by researchers and students everywhere. CORPUS publications are typically released on the Web on an open-access basis with no paywall, subject to a data license that permits only non-commercial use of the data with attribution to its author(s).

CORPUS publications are citable on a granular level via persistent URL hyperlinks to highly atomized database items. This ensures that individual items in the published data can be reliably referenced and reproduced, with no fear of broken links, down to the level of single images or portions of images, audio or video segments, table rows and cells, or textual words and phrases.

Digital Companions for Printed Works

A CORPUS publication may take the form of a digital companion that supplements a printed volume. A digital companion will contain relevant data that is too extensive to appear in print. For example, scholars in the disciplines of art history and archaeology often create large numbers of images and maps in the course of their research and can print only a small selection of them. In other fields, a digital companion might be needed to publish audio files, video clips, or 3D models that are impossible to reproduce in a printed book. Individual items in a CORPUS digital companion can be linked to the e-book version of a printed work so that clicking on a link in the e-book displays the digital content in a browser window.

Self-Published Websites

In addition to institutionally certified publications, CORPUS enables the production of self-published websites. Some researchers do not feel the need for peer review or professional editing and just went to put their data on the Web for others to see. Any data in the OCHRE database platform used by CORPUS can be published automatically in a dynamically generated, data-driven website. However, in the absence of a formal publication proposal, peer review, and a legal publication agreement, the website will not be endorsed by CORPUS and the name and logo of the University of Chicago will not appear on it.