Boundaries of the Postdigital: A Two-Stage Scoping Review

Abstract ‘Postdigital’ became established as an academic concept around 2000 and has undergone conceptual transformations since. Despite attempts to map the postdigital, no systematic overview of its history and trends exists. This review asks: What is the scope and nature of the scientific literature on the postdigital? How is the term enacted and understood in the most widely cited academic literature? Stage one involved a broad bibliometric mapping of the postdigital, yielding 1533 documents spanning 1988 to 2025. Stage two included a qualitative synthesis of how the postdigital is defined and deployed across the 58 most-cited works based on metrics, source, and disciplinary field. Results indicate a sharp inflection point in 2018; fewer than 15% of all postdigital literature was published prior to the founding of the Postdigital Science and Education (PDSE) publishing ecosystem. The field exhibits a high degree of centralisation anchored by the PDSE journal, the PDSE book series, and its editors. Rather than having a set definition, the postdigital acts as a boundary object that accrues distinct meanings across different social worlds, spanning from clinical and technical fields to the humanities and social sciences. Often referring to dissolved borders between the digital and analog or an era, the postdigital functions more as a framing term and critical orientation than a concept that is empirically or theoretically operationalised. The results offer the field of postdigital studies a first systematic account of its own trajectory and a grounded basis for continuous scholarly dialogue.