paperiversiona

Paperiversiona is a term used in literary studies, digital humanities, and artistically inclined archives to describe a hybrid practice that treats paper artifacts as vessels for multiple textual versions, blending physical objects with ideas of digital versioning. In its broad sense, it refers to projects or artifacts that encode, preserve, or present successive revisions of a text within a single physical object or across interconnected physical and digital layers.

Origin and usage: The term appears in experimental writing communities and scholarly discussions about revision histories. It is a neologism with uncertain origin, commonly associated with zine culture, artists’ books, and speculative archiving experiments that foreground materiality and process rather than a single final edition.

Characteristics include translucent sleeves or overlays in a book to reveal earlier and later revisions, marginal annotations printed on different layers, movable die-cuts, or digital interfaces that present parallel tracks of edits linked to physical pages. The concept emphasizes non-linear reading and iterative authorship rather than a fixed, linear edition.

Impact and reception: While largely niche, paperiversiona has been discussed as a critique of traditional editioning and as a method for teaching revision history and archival practices. Proponents say it illuminates how texts exist through time and across media; critics warn that it can be impractical for large corpora or for readers seeking a single, authoritative text.

See also: version control, archival theory, artists' books, zines.