A university in Wuhan directly under the Ministry of Education has officially inaugurated its School of Digital Studies, also known as the Digital Publishing Research Institute, on September 20, according to an announcement from the institution.

The new school is positioned with a focus on "data as the foundation, artificial intelligence as the engine, publishing as the core, and talent cultivation as the priority." Its mission is to cultivate interdisciplinary innovative talents in the fields of digital publishing and corpus intelligence, while offering practical higher-education solutions for the digital content industry and AI corpus governance.

The school is built upon four core academic disciplines: publishing science, data science and engineering, journalism and communication, and education. It will concentrate its efforts on two primary research areas: digital publishing and corpus intelligence. Within digital publishing, the focus areas include intelligent proofreading and knowledge engineering, enhanced publishing and knowledge services, as well as digital copyright protection and content security. For corpus intelligence, the school will deepen research into high-quality dataset engineering, multimodal corpus annotation and domain adaptation, while also advancing studies on corpus rights confirmation, circulation, and assetization.

The school plans to establish a collaborative platform featuring academic mentors, industry mentors, and international visiting professors through a joint university-enterprise appointment system. It will implement a dual-helix educational model that balances technical training with humanistic education. Students will gain technical expertise spanning programming, data engineering, large-model applications, and AI systems engineering, while also developing humanities skills in content comprehension, editorial analysis, and extending to copyright ethics and social impact assessment. This approach aims to cultivate versatile digital talent who are proficient in both technology and content.

During the co-construction ceremony, the Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory for Corpus Intelligence was officially inaugurated, and a pilot project for a trusted data space in publishing convergence was simultaneously unveiled.

The university has a strong legacy in the digital publishing sector. It began admitting undergraduates for editorial and publishing studies in 2003, holds a first-level master's degree program in journalism and communication, as well as second-level master's programs including digital publishing. In 2017, it was approved to host one of the nation's first key laboratories for publishing convergence development. In 2022, it led the approval for the Ministry of Education's Engineering Research Center for Digital Publishing Intelligent Service Technology, becoming the first of its kind in China's publishing industry. Notably, a digital communication engineering company spun off from the university has emerged as an AI unicorn in the publishing sector and was listed among the 2025 Forbes China Top 50 AI Technology Enterprises.