Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Living Archives at Scale: Reparative Care, Scalar Grammar and the Metabolism of Post-Digital Knowledge Infrastructures’.

“Living Archives at Scale” argues that contemporary archives can no longer be conceived as vaults, warehouses, or neutral databases, because post-digital knowledge systems now operate as metabolic infrastructures that must ingest, organise, expose, shelter, delay, recombine, and reactivate materials across human and machine-readable environments. Its central proposition is that preservation alone is insufficient once archives, datasets, repositories, metadata systems, and research corpora exceed the scale of immediate comprehension; the decisive task becomes sustaining care, orientation, legibility, and interpretive plurality amid abundance. The article synthesises Caswell’s reparative archives, Underwood’s computational scale, Seaver’s algorithmic culture, Beer’s metric power, and Rheinberger’s experimental systems into five operational concepts: archival metabolism, scalar grammar, strategic porosity, differentiated speed, and stable nucleus / plastic periphery. These concepts form a design grammar for living archives: metabolism processes growth; scalar grammar makes large corpora inhabitable; porosity enables machine discovery without surrendering interpretive thickness; differentiated speed protects slow cores while allowing fast peripheral circulation; and the stable nucleus permits experimental plasticity without dissolution. The case of Socioplastics clarifies this framework as a field architecture composed of DOI anchors, public indexes, datasets, nodes, routes, and adaptive conceptual surfaces. In conclusion, the article reframes archival care as an infrastructural problem of scale: to remain ethical, an archive must not merely preserve memory, but metabolise abundance so that knowledge remains durable, navigable, reparative, and alive.