The Relic Condition: When Published Scholarship Becomes Material for Its Own Replacement

ArXi:2604.16116v1 Announce Type: cross We extracted the scholarly reasoning systems of two internationally prominent humanities and social science scholars from their published corpora alone, converted those systems into structured inference-time constraints for a large language model, and tested whether the resulting scholar-bots could perform core academic functions at expert-assessed quality. The distillation pipeline used an eight-layer extraction method and a nine-module skill architecture grounded in local, closed-corpus analysis.