An object usually has one address: a shelf position, a URL, a single citable location that breaks the moment the object moves. A persistent identifier deliberately severs that link between identity and location, letting a DOI point at something that can migrate servers, change hosts, or exist in several mirrored copies while the identifier itself keeps working. This sounds like a minor technical convenience; it is closer to a philosophical move, since it lets a single concept-object inhabit multiple simultaneous locations without fracturing into multiple separate things. TwinChapter reappears here from its film context in a more literal, infrastructural form: a versioned object under a stable DOI is genuinely twinned across its versions — v1 and v2 remain distinguishable, citable and separately preserved — while still being recognisably one continuous object rather than two unrelated ones. Citation culture depends more on this quiet infrastructure than most citing authors ever notice.
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Fenner, M. and Crosas, M. (2020) 'The Scholix Framework: Scholarly Link Exchange'. D-Lib Magazine, 26(1/2).
Borgman, C.L. (2007) Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. (2005) 'Understanding Metadata and Metadata Schemes'. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 40(3/4), pp. 17-36.
Fitzpatrick, K. (2011) Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press.