When reproduction splits: clarifying replication, reproducibility, verification, and authenticity in digitally mediated humanities research

Debates on replication and reproducibility have often proceeded as if key terms carried stable meanings across disciplines. This assumption becomes especially difficult to sustain in digitally mediated humanities research, where digitized objects, research procedures, evidentiary records, interpretive claims, and judgments of authenticity are repeatable in different senses. This article argues that the problem is not simply that replication is harder to achieve in humanities research, but that digital mediation separates forms of repeatability that are often treated as equivalent. The reproduction of an object, the recoverability of a research procedure, the retestability of a claim, the confirmability of an evidentiary chain, and judgments of authenticity no longer coincide. In response, the article proposes a five-part conceptual framework that distinguishes reproduction, reproducibility, replication, verification, and authenticity across different analytical levels. NFTs are used as a diagnostic case because they make this divergence especially visible: digital artworks remain subject to exact reproduction at the level of information, while their authenticity is increasingly organized through procedural verification, institutional recognition, and cultural interpretation rather than material singularity or experiential presence alone. In this case, exact copyability, explicit status assertions, and repeatable procedures of verification coexist without collapsing into one another. The article then connects this diagnostic insight to digital humanities methodology by showing why object access, workflow documentation, claim re-examination, evidentiary verification, and authenticity judgment should not be treated as the same requirement. It argues that terminological clarification is a necessary precondition for more precise methodological discussion of transparency, reanalysis, and interpretive accountability.