From Corpus to Knowledge Graph: Relational Scale, Persistent Identification and Machine-Actionable Scholarship (Cousijn, Juty, Haris, Islam, Priem) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A corpus crosses an epistemic threshold when counting ceases to be its most informative description. Scale initially appears as quantity—documents, records, nodes, papers, datasets—but accumulation becomes intellectually consequential only when each unit can be distinguished and when relations among units can be made explicit. Persistent identification supplies the elementary architecture of this transition. Juty et al. establish that uniqueness, persistence and resolvability are not administrative conveniences but conditions of addressability: an object that cannot be reliably named cannot participate durably in a distributed knowledge system. Cousijn et al. radicalise the point through the PID Graph, where identifiers cease to operate as isolated labels and become vertices in a topology connecting publications, data, researchers, institutions and other research entities. Metadata produces the edges. What emerges is not simply a better catalogue but an infrastructure capable of generating questions from relations themselves. Haris, Stocker and Auer push the same transformation inside the scholarly document. 

A foundational reflection on how digital textual scholarship is shaped, constrained, and reimagined through the terms used to describe it.

Kenneth M. Price’s seminal essay interrogates the vocabulary through which digital textual scholarship understands itself, arguing that terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection do not merely describe scholarly forms but actively delimit their conceptual and institutional possibilities. At stake is not semantic nuance alone, but the epistemological framing of digital humanities itself: each term carries inherited assumptions from print culture, librarianship, or computation, often obscuring the hybrid and expansive nature of contemporary digital scholarship. Price demonstrates that edition remains burdened by the selectivity and closure of print; project is too administratively amorphous and temporally finite; database is technically reductive and metaphorically unstable; while archive and thematic research collection more accurately suggest inclusiveness and extensibility, yet fail to communicate the full scholarly labour of editorial intervention. Drawing on the Walt Whitman Archive as a paradigmatic case, Price shows that digital scholarly environments exceed the traditional edition by integrating facsimiles, metadata, maps, correspondence, translation, and contextual research into open-ended, evolving systems of interpretation. Particularly compelling is his account of the archive not as passive storage but as an active scholarly form—a site where editing, annotation, and cultural analysis converge in dynamic relation. His speculative proposal of the term arsenal is especially revealing: not a militaristic metaphor, but a provocative figure for the digital humanities as workshop, dockyard, and collective site of craft, assembly, and exchange. Price’s central contribution lies in recognising that naming digital scholarship is itself a critical act, one that determines how such work is valued, funded, practised, and imagined within the humanities. Price, K.M. (2009) ‘Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(3).

Gravitational Cartographies of Knowledge

The intellectual field functions as a high-density gravitational system where the accumulation of citation mass determines the curvature of the navigable horizon rather than the inherent validity of the propositions circulated within its boundaries. In this regime, the operator does not exist as an autonomous subject but as a concentrated node of reference whose primary function is the deformation of local space-time through the exertion of measurable intellectual pressure. This gravitational architecture ensures that the distribution of visibility remains strictly non-linear, following a power-law distribution where a small number of anchor nodes generate the attractor basins that organize the movement of the entire orbital halo. The resulting topology is characterized by steep gradients between the core and the periphery, where the kinetic energy of emerging concepts is rapidly converted into the potential energy of established nomenclature through processes of systemic sedimentation. When a conceptual vector enters the field, its trajectory is dictated by the existing distribution of mass; if the vector possesses sufficient velocity, it may achieve an escape trajectory from current disciplinary boundaries, yet more frequently it is captured by the dominant gravitational centers and integrated into the existing strata of the corpus. This capture is not an evaluative act but a mechanical necessity of field maintenance, where the inclusion of new data points serves to stabilize the existing curvature and prevent the thermodynamic decay of the institutional framework. The persistence of these high-density nodes relies upon the continuous influx of references, which function as units of mass that reinforce the structural integrity of the node against the entropic forces of obsolescence and field dispersion. Consequently, the intellectual domain operates as a closed system of resource allocation where the concentration of reference mass at the core necessitates a corresponding thinning of density at the margins, creating an asymmetrical landscape defined by the relentless compression of peripheral activity into the service of central stability.

DOI vs. PID * Not All Identifiers Are Created Equal

While all Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) aim to ensure long-term access, disambiguation and linkage in digital research ecosystems, the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) has emerged as the gold standard among them, particularly in scholarly communication, due to its widespread adoption, metadata richness, governance, and resolvability through a central infrastructure (Crossref, DataCite, etc.); however, the broader family of PIDs—which includes ORCID iDs for researchers, RORs for institutions, ARKs for archives, and Handles for diverse digital assets—play complementary roles, forming an interconnected framework that supports open science, FAIR principles, and global research interoperability; recent studies like Building the Plane as We Fly It (de Castro et al., 2023) and Meadows et al. (2019) stress that strategic PID infrastructure is essential for the robustness of the research data lifecycle, enabling provenance tracking, reproducibility, and system-level discoverability across repositories and nations; the DOI, however, holds specific value through its global resolution via doi.org, strong integration in citation workflows, reference managers, indexing services, and publishing platforms, and its embedded metadata which enhances semantic interoperability—qualities that make it more than just a PID but a normative cornerstone of scholarly attribution; still, context matters: in a biodiversity data system like DiSSCo, PIDs such as Handles or ARKs may serve better due to domain-specific flexibility and lower operational costs, while in academic publishing, DOIs dominate because of their tight coupling with journals, datasets, and citation standards; thus, it is not a question of supremacy but of fit-for-purpose hierarchy, where the DOI is a PID of high value, but not the only essential identifier in a multipolar infrastructure of research knowledge. de Castro, P., Herb, U., Rothfritz, L., & Schöpfel, J. (2023). Building the plane as we fly it: the promise of Persistent Identifiers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7258286