M. Kurosu (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCII 2014, LNCS 8512, pp. 3–12, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 CORPUS: Next-Generation Online Platform for Research Collaborations in Humanities Yuan Jia 1 , Xi Niu 1 , Reecha Bharali 1 , Davide Bolchini 1 , and André De Tienne 2 1 School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University 2 Institute for American Thought 1535 W. Michigan Street, 2ES 0010 902 W New York Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202 {jiayuan,xiniu,rbharali,dbolchin,adetienn}@iupui.edu Abstract. Two major research resources for humanities scholars are manuscripts and scholarly editions (rigorously reconstituted standard texts of seminal writers and thinkers). However, most of these resources either have not been digitized or are not easy to access online [1]. Consequently, scholars frequently need to spend unnecessary time and effort to find and manage different versions of mate- rials (physical or digital) from different sources. To solve this problem, we pro- pose an online platform called CORPUS – a Collaborative Online Research Platform for Users of Scholarly edition – to support scholarly research online in an efficient manner. CORPUS aims to integrate different types of research materials in the humanities (manuscripts, scholarly editions, online pub- lications, and personal notes) and aggregate different versions of the same texts. In addition, it enhances collaboration among scholars while also providing them with a peer-review-based incentive to share and publish their research work. Keywords: Contextual Inquiry, Digital Humanities, User Study, Design, and Prototype. 1 Introduction The role of scholarly editions is central to the humanities: they seek to reconstitute and establish the texts of seminal writers and thinkers with rigorous exactitude in order to provide researchers with an authoritative standard text they can trust. The majority of such editions exist only in print and the source manuscripts have either not been digitized or are hard to access online. This forces scholars to spend unnecessary time and effort to conduct research on different versions (physical and digital) of materials from different sources (online, library or other organizations) [1, 5]. To solve this problem, we developed CORPUS (Collaboration Research Platform for User of Scholar Edition), which is a novel collaborative online platform aiming at supporting the research process of scholars in humanities in a much more efficient and effective way. CORPUS has two unique goals: 1. Integration. to integrate different types of research materials in Humanities— manuscripts, scholarly editions, online publications and personal notes—together to support scholars’ need for their research work;