Save As…: The PDF as archive,authentic interface and epistemic object

Abstract

This article examines how digital authenticity is constructed through the Portable Document Format (PDF), namely the ways in which format becomes a site where digital memory is fabricated, managed and selectively obscured. By interrogating the visible (marginalia, page skews, residue) and invisible (OCR text files, metadata) features, I show how these paratextual elements contribute to production of authenticity across digital documents. I articulate this process as transversal authenticity, in which authority and legitimacy emerge from the interaction of historical print conventions, digital infrastructures and affordances and sociocultural narratives. Drawing on approaches from media studies, including format studies and media archeology, this article analyzes the technical (scanning techniques, encoding processes) alongside the social (historical narratives, cultural discourse). I argue that transversal authenticity matters, not just in the verification of PDFs but in the determination of cultural and legal ontologies, meanings and affects and in the material and discursive epistemological consequences. This extends to contemporary contexts where formats like the PDF are increasingly used not just in archives, but also as epistemic foundations within computational knowledge infrastructures of LLMs.

Keywords

format archives authenticity digital media documents Adobe media archeology PDF digital memory paratext

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adobe (2021) XMP standards. Available at: https://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/standards.html (accessed 9 March 2026).

Adobe (2025) Document properties and metadata overview. Available at: https://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/au/en/acrobat/desktop/edit-documents/edit-pdf-properties/pdf-properties.html (accessed 9 March 2026).

Adobe (2026a) OCR meaning: What is OCR and why it’s important. Available at: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/guides/what-is-ocr.html (accessed 13 March 2026).

Adobe (2026b) e-Sign software: Electronic & digital signatures. Available at: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/business/sign.html (accessed 4 June 2024).

Adobe Acrobat (2024) History of the PDF Timeline. Available at: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/pdf-timeline.html (accessed 4 June 2024).

Agarwal

Naaman

Vashistha

(2025) AI Suggestions homogenize writing toward western styles and diminish cultural nuances. In: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama Japan, 26 April 2025, pp.1–21. ACM. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713564 (accessed 22 September 2025).

Anderson

Shah

Kreminski

(2024) Homogenization effects of large language models on human creative ideation. In: Creativity and Cognition, Chicago IL USA, 23 June 2024, pp. 413–425. ACM. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3656204 (accessed 22 September 2025).

Banet-Weiser

(2012) Authentic TM: Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York University Press.

Bauer

(2024) 3D media in the transversal era. Afterimage 51(1): 47–69.

10.

Benjamin

(1968) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: Arendt

(ed.) Illuminations. Schocken, pp.217–251.

11.

Benoit

(2017) #MPLP Part 1: Comparing domain expert and novice social tags in a minimally processed digital archives. American Archivist 80(2): 407–438.

12.

Bogaard

Hollink

Wielemaker

, et al. (2019) Metadata categorization for identifying search patterns in a digital library. Journal of Documentation 75(2): 270–286.

13.

Bollmer

(2023) The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion. University of Minnesota Press.

14.

Bracha

(2008) The ideology of authorship revisited: Authors, markets, and liberal values in early American copyright. Yale Law Journal 118(2): 186.

15.

Briddock

(2014) Tech Origins PDF. Micro Mart, 4 September. Future Publishing Ltd.

16.

Brown

(2023) Narrating the lives of unidentified sitters. Available at: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msbtemple/narrating-the-lives-of-unidentified-sitters/about/research (accessed 29 July 2024).

17.

Buchanan

(2016) Indigenous Rights in New Zealand: Legislation, Litigation, and Protest. In Custodia Legis. Available at: //blogs.loc.gov/law/2016/11/indigenous-rights-in-new-zealand-legislation-litigation-and-protest (accessed 31 October 2023).

18.

Burchardt

(2023) Are searches in OCR-generated archives trustworthy?: An analysis of digital newspaper archives. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 64(1): 31–54.

19.

Businessweek (1975) The office of the future. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160308005917/http://www.bloomberg.com:80/bw/stories/1975-06-30/the-office-of-the-futurebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice (accessed 24 July 2024).

20.

Carlson

Bryan

Dell

(2023) Efficient OCR for building a diverse digital history. arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02737 (accessed 11 June 2024).

21.

Computer History Museum (2016) Ethernet office system for the future, by Xerox PARC. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJoH6XuUsoY (accessed 16 March 2026).

22.

Cordell

(2017) ‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking dirty OCR seriously. Book History 20(1): 188–225.

23.

Cueto

Hendrikx

(2017) Introduction. In: Cueto

Hendrikx

(eds) Authenticity? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age. Valiz, pp.9–17.

24.

Derrida

(2015) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. Prenowitz

) University of Chicago Press.

25.

Duarte

(2017) Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country. University of Washington Press.

26.

Duffy

(2023) The Best Scanning and OCR Apps. Available at: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-mobile-scanning-apps (accessed 12 June 2024).

27.

Eisenstein

(1986) Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought. Rare Book Collection. University of North Carolina Press.

28.

Eisenstein

(2012) The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Canto Classics ed. Canto Classics. Cambridge University Press.

29.

Emerson

(2014) Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. University of Minnesota Press.

30.

Enli

(2015) Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality. Peter Lang.

31.

Francois

Eglin

Biou

(2022) Text detection and Post-OCR correction in engineering documents. In: Uchida

Barney

Eglin

(eds) Document Analysis Systems. Springer International Publishing, pp.726–740. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06555-2_49

32.

Genette

(1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press.

33.

Geschke

(2017) Seybold newsletters and seminars. In: Desktop Publishing Pioneer Meeting, 23 May. Computer History Museum.

34.

Gitelman

(2014) Paper Knowledge Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke University Press.

35.

Goldsmith

(2013) The Artful Accidents of Google Books. The New Yorker, 4 December. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-artful-accidents-of-google-books (accessed 25 September 2017).

36.

Hertz

Parikka

(2010) CTheory Interview: Archaeologies of Media Art. CTheory. Epub ahead of print 2010.

37.

Holtermann

Röttger

Dill

, et al. (2024) Evaluating the elementary multilingual capabilities of large language models with MultiQ. arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03814 (accessed 3 November 2025).

38.

ISO (2019) ISO 16684-1:2019. Available at: https://www.iso.org/standard/75163.html (accessed 9 March 2026).

39.

Jancovic

(2019) Fold, format, fault: On reformatting and loss. In: Jancovic

Volmar

Schneider

(eds) Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures. meson press, pp.195–217. https://doi.org/10.14619/1556

40.

Kaminska

(2019) Don’t copy that: Security printing and the making of high-tech paper. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25(4): 590–606.

41.

Kirschenbaum

(2016) Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Harvard University Press.

42.

Kittler

(1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press.

43.

Koopman

(2022) The political theory of data: Institutions, algorithms, & formats in racial redlining. Political Theory 50(2): 337–361.

44.

Lee

(2017) This was written on stolen Indigenous land. Available at: http://www.decolonisingdesign.com/guest-contributions/2017/guest-post-this-was-written-on-stolen-indigenous-land/ (accessed 8 February 2022).

45.

Lenovo (2023) How does a scanner work? Advantages & uses. Available at: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/what-is-a-scanner/?orgRef=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F (accessed 12 June 2024).

46.

Manzo

Kaufman

Punjasthitkul

, et al. (2015) ‘By the people, for the people’: Assessing the value of crowdsourced, user-generated metadata. Digital Humanities Quarterly 9(1). https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/9/1/000204/000204.html

47.

Mattern

(2017) Code + Clay. . . Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. University of Minnesota Press.

48.

McElligott

Patten

(2014) The Perils of Print Culture: Book, Print and Publishing History in Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan.

49.

Nicholson

(1993) Adobe’s Acrobat Facilitates Document Exchanges: [FINAL Edition]. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext), 21 June.

50.

NZ History (2023) Read the treaty. Available at: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/read-the-treaty/english-text (accessed 11 March 2026).

51.

Oettler

(2013) PDF/A in a Nutshell 2.0. Association for Digital Document Standards. Available at: https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/PDFA_in_a_Nutshell_211.pdf (accessed 20 April 2024).

52.

Ogden

Summers

Walker

(2024) Know(ing) infrastructure: The Wayback Machine as object and instrument of digital research. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 30(1): 167–189.

53.

Özyeşilpınar

(2024) Maps as rhetorical tools of colonial power and alternative cartographies: The Americas’ cartographic invention. Rhetoric Review 43(2): 116–131.

54.

Parikka

(2015) A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press.

55.

Petrov

La Malfa

Torr

, et al. (2023) Language model tokenizers introduce unfairness between languages. In: Oh

Naumann

Globerson

, et al. (eds) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Curran Associates, Inc., pp.36963–36990. Available at: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/74bb24dca8334adce292883b4b651eda-Paper-Conference.pdf

56.

Puglia

Reed

Rhodes

, et al. (2005) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files. Digital Library Federation.

57.

Reisner

(2025) Search LibGen, the pirated-books database that meta used to train AI. The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ (accessed 17 September 2025).

58.

Rose-Redwood

Blu Barnd

Lucchesi

, et al. (2020) Decolonizing the map: Recentering indigenous mappings. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 55(3): 151–162.

59.

Scagliola

(2017) Digital Source Criticism in the 21st century: Reconsidering Ranke’s principles in the digital age. Available at: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/digital-source-criticism-21st-century-reconsidering-rankes-principles-digital-age (accessed 22 May 2024).

60.

Schantz

(1982) The History of OCR, Optical Character Recognition. Recognition Technologies Users Ass.

61.

Schewe

(2004) About Metadata. September. Adobe Systems.

62.

Sellen

Harper

(2003) The Myth of the Paperless Office. MIT Press.

63.

Sinha

Rekha

(2025) Digitization of document and information extraction using OCR. arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11156 (accessed 9 March 2026).

64.

Star

(2016) Misplaced concretism and concrete situations: Feminism, method, and information technology. In: Bowker

Timmermans

Clarke

, et al. (eds) Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working With Leigh Star. MIT Press, pp.168–195.

65.

Steensen

(2019) Journalism’s epistemic crisis and its solution: Disinformation, datafication and source criticism. Journalism 20(1): 185–189.

66.

Sterne

(2012) MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press.

67.

Strauven

(2021) Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices. Meson Press.

68.

Tanselle

(1971) The Bibliographical Description of Paper. Studies in Bibliography 24. Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, pp.27–67.

69.

Te Tiriti O Waitangi With Footnotes (2023). Available at: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/sites/default/files/documents/treaty-kawharu-footnotes.pdf

70.

The Computer Bulletin (2004) John Warnock. The Computer Bulletin 46(4): 16–17.

71.

Unangst

(2023) (De)Colonial historical geography and historical GIS. Journal of Historical Geography 79: 76–86.

72.

Waitangi Tribunal (2024) The Waitangi Tribunal. Available at: https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/en/about/about-the-waitangi-tribunal/about-the-waitangi-tribunal (accessed 11 March 2026).

73.

Wang

Pan

Guo

, et al. (2021) From object detection to text detection and recognition: A brief evolution history of optical character recognition. WIREs Computational Statistics 13(5): e1547.

74.

Warnock

(2018a) Oral History of John Warnock, Part 1 of 2. Available at: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738759/

75.

Warnock

(2018b) Oral History of John Warnock, Part 2 of 2. Available at: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738854/

76.

Warnock

Geschke

(2019) Founding and growing Adobe Systems, Inc. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 41(3): 24–34.

77.

Wershler

Emerson

Parikka

(2022) The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies. University of Minnesota Press.

78.

Wershler-Henry

(2007) The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Cornell University Press.

79.

Zboray

(2013) Print Culture. In: Simonson

Peck

Craig

, et al. (eds) The Handbook of Communication History. International Communication Association Handbook. Routledge, pp.181–195.

80.

Zipper

(2001) Warnock on PDF: Its Past, Present and Future. The Seybold Report. Seybold Publications and Seminars.