The publication is not disappearing. It remains one of the most successful intellectual technologies ever created: a bounded object through which arguments can be composed, evidence reviewed, responsibility assigned and knowledge preserved. What is changing is its monopoly over scholarly identity. Contemporary research increasingly operates through objects that exceed documentary boundaries. Concepts recur across texts. Datasets evolve through versions. Claims enter graphs and databases. Search systems retrieve passages independently from their containing articles. Language models recombine textual traces drawn from vast numbers of publications. Knowledge therefore persists through several overlapping architectures. It has a documentary body through which it is published, a conceptual body through which distinctions recur, a relational body through which objects connect, a temporal body through which versions change, an institutional body through which records are maintained and a computational body through which they are indexed, retrieved and transformed. The publication remains essential, but it becomes one layer among these layers. This condition has precedents. Otlet imagined documentation as the decomposition and recombination of knowledge across books. Briet expanded the idea of the document beyond written containers. Bush proposed associative trails through growing archives. Nelson treated hypertext as persistent connection between textual fragments. Foucault described the archive not merely as a store but as the system governing the appearance and transformation of statements. Digital scholarly infrastructures intensify these earlier intuitions because granular objects can now acquire identifiers, version histories and machine-readable relations of their own. A post-documentary architecture should not dissolve publications into fragments. Context remains essential. The task is instead to expose more clearly what already passes through the document: concepts, methods, claims, versions, relations and histories of occurrence. If these objects become independently visible, citation can become more precise, computational reuse more accountable and conceptual history easier to reconstruct. The cost is additional governance and maintenance, since granular knowledge produces granular responsibilities. The future of scholarly infrastructure may therefore depend less on building ever larger archives than on making their internal relations intelligible. A durable system does not merely preserve objects; it preserves the pathways through which objects acquire meaning, change and remain connected. The document continues to matter because thought needs composition. What comes after the document is not its disappearance, but an expanded architecture in which documents coexist with the intellectual objects that exceed them.
Briet, S. (1951) Qu’est-ce que la documentation?
Bush, V. (1945) ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101–108.
Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir.
Nelson, T. H. (1965) ‘Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate’.
Otlet, P. (1934) Traité de documentation.