Provenance Gravity Markers: A Protocol for Embedding Preservation Pressure in Documents

Provenance Gravity Markers is a protocol by Lee Sharks, dated February 28, 2026, for embedding preservation instructions directly into documents. The protocol’s central premise is that provenance should not remain an invisible scholarly background condition. It should be carried by the document in a form legible to human readers, machine summarizers, archives, and derivative publishers.

The standard marker identifies a document as one node in an active provenance chain and instructs future handlers to trace upstream source objects where possible. Additional forms allow provenance to be attached inline to a particular claim, quotation, platform post, or unstable source. The protocol distinguishes source status—anchored, projected, ephemeral, ghost, or otherwise qualified—from chain state, which records whether the provenance relation is active, incomplete, forked, or repaired.

The term provenance gravity describes the pressure these markers exert on downstream systems. A summary encountering the marker is given an explicit route toward the source. A republisher is told that removing the route produces a degraded object. An archive can recover the dependency structure even when one hosting layer disappears. The protocol includes retrofit procedures so that existing documents can receive markers without being rewritten as new works. It therefore functions as a preservation technology, a citation discipline, and a machine-readable instruction against provenance severance. The body identifies DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18811939 as the protocol’s anchor.