Origins

---

For 28 years, Mike Heroux taught the computer science capstone — officially CSCI 373, the Senior Research Seminar — at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, an alternative to an Honors Thesis, built around a single question: can you become the campus expert on a topic of your own choosing, and build the habits to do it again on your own for the rest of your career?

Twenty-eight years of a course accumulates a lot. Assignments get rewritten as the field changes. Slide decks get replaced. Techniques get refined, some get dropped, some get renamed. What survives all of that turnover is a smaller, sturdier core: the actual techniques for doing research, writing, and speaking well — the parts that were never really about any one semester’s students, or any one year’s tools.

Corpus exists to pull that core out and give it a home that outlives the course itself. Mike is retiring from teaching the capstone, and the material deserved something more durable to build on than a personal website’s file structure. Corpus is that something: an archive, organized so the timeless material (Human Skills) is clearly separated from the material that’s genuinely tied to the current moment’s tools (AI-Assisted Workflows and Agent Skills) — see Philosophy for why that split matters — with a visible path for future instructors, students, and contributors to keep adding to it going forward.

The name fits a pattern already set by two related projects, Scribe (writing) and Orator (speaking), both part of the Collegeville project’s Latin naming convention, itself a nod to the Benedictine setting the course was taught in for nearly three decades. Corpus — a body of work — seemed like the right name for a site whose entire purpose is holding a body of work together after the person who built it moves on to the next thing.