After the Obelus is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, deposited 29 July 2026, tracing editorial custody from Alexandria to the machine edition.
Its organising figure is the obelus — the mark Alexandrian editors placed beside a suspect line to preserve it while doubting it. The paper sets that against the tombstone, the modern repository's mark that deletes while certifying, and reads the difference as a change in what editorial marking is for: the obelus keeps the reader's judgement alive, the tombstone forecloses it.
Marx's manuscript tradition supplies the modern test case, where the MEGA edition's history shows how much of an author's meaning is constituted by editorial decisions about what survives in what order. The paper's argument arrives at machine composition as the newest editorial layer — and the one that marks nothing, offering no obelus, no tombstone, and no visible trace of what it declined to carry. It was deposited as a version of record after journal plans for it were superseded.