About

The Post45 Data Collective is a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present.

Peer Review & Citation

We encourage scholars to share their data openly by providing a formal peer review process for datasets and by publishing datasets with citable DOIs that are registered with the Library of Congress. These conventions enable scholars to earn much-deserved recognition for their intellectual labor, since peer-reviewed publications and citations are considered among the highest forms of scholarly achievement.

Exploration & Usability

We further enable the scholarly community and general public to explore and re-use our datasets by hosting them on an easily navigable website that allows for simple searching, filtering, and downloading.

Documentation & Data Essays

Lastly, we provide robust documentation for all our datasets by requiring authors to submit “data essays,” which address the social and historical context of the data, how the data was collected, cleaned, and categorized, as well as possible ethical concerns or misuses of the data.

Support

The Post45 Data Collective is supported by Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship. We have also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2024-2026) and, in 2023, from Emory’s Program to Enhance Research and Scholarship (PERS).

History of the Project

Dan Sinykin and Laura B. McGrath began planning and research for the Post45 Data Collective in 2019. They observed that many scholars in the field of post-1945 literature and culture were building datasets and collaborating informally to figure out how to make various interpretive and technical decisions related to the data. Data is particularly important to the period of literary and cultural history after 1945 because of the exponential growth in the number of books and cultural objects produced, which makes understanding broad trends in the field difficult without the help of data.

While the scholar-driven curation of datasets in the 2010s was thus very valuable, scholars’ formatting and documentation choices were happening on a piecemeal basis; they were not receiving academic recognition for their labor; and their finished datasets did not have a suitable home.

To address these problems, Sinykin and McGrath decided to launch a field-specific, open-access, peer-reviewed data collective. To do so, they performed a literature review, assembled an editorial board (consisting of scholars in literary studies, digital humanities, and library and information science), developed peer review criteria, and established coordination with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, which agreed to build a website and maintain its data infrastructure. On March 1, 2021, Sinykin and McGrath launched the Post45 Data Collective.

In the summer of 2021, we launched the “Data Development Project” (DDP), a program designed to help researchers in the field complete the final stages of data collection work by providing them with up to 60 hours of data curation-focused research assistance. Through this assistance (awarded via mini-grants), we supported the work of four excellent datasets, which address subjects ranging from the literature program of the NEA to Hollywood film screenplays, and which will eventually be published in the collective.

Public Writing & Media

In October 2022 and November 2023, the Post45 Data Collective partnered with Public Books to publish two series of essays, “Hacking the Culture Industries,” which both drew on and were inspired by data from the collection.

Post45 Data Collective datasets have also been featured prominently in venues including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers Magazine, and WNYC’s On the Media.