The Open Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CO.SHS), funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, wishes to foster research based on the various collections of digital textual documents made available free of charge to researchers thanks to agreements signed with several documentary and heritage institutions in Quebec, in Canada, and worldwide. One of CO.SHS’s main goals is indeed to develop research capacity for big data in the humanities and social sciences, which calls, among other things, for the implementation of a centralized access to large collections of digital textual documents.

The CO.SHS team, led by Vincent Larivière, associate professor at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication and scientific director of the Érudit platform, therefore wishes to invite you to present non-commercial scientific research projects that will require, in part or in whole, the use of one of these collections of documents. For example, we are targeting, among other types of projects, those that leverage new methodologies (data mining, etc.) or technologically innovative tools for the exploration, analysis, and visualization of the knowledge networks that can be found in these corpora.

Available corpora – The following corpora are readily available for download for research purposes:

• Scholarly and cultural journals from the Érudit platform;
• Digitized Quebec journals and newspapers from Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ).

The following corpora can be obtained upon request, with an additional transfer period:

• Archives and heritage documents from Library and Archives Canada (LAC);
• The Journal des débats from Quebec’s National Assembly library;
• Metadata and introductory pages of Quebec books from the ANEL-De Marque repository;
• Scholarly publications from Persée;
• Scholarly journals from SciELO.

Deadline – You can request access at all time, but priority will be given to download requests for the Érudit and BAnQ corpora received before March 31st 2019.

Eligibility requirements – All non-commercial scientific projects are accepted, pending licence agreement signature for corpora use.

Guidelines – A project description form must be filled out to allow the scientific committee to ascertain that the project is not intended for commercial purposes. The licence agreement for corpora use must then be signed. Please notify us of your intent to submit a request, and we will send you the required documents: corpus@erudit.org.

→ Download the Call for Projects here: CO.SHS Call for Projects – March 2019