In the 19th century US, newspapers across the country and the world were linked through the “exchange system,” through which editors swapped papers for mutual reuse. The Viral Texts project (https://viraltexts.org) has studied this system through many lenses, but this talk will focus on a few central questions of scale and knowledge representation. Given the losses of history and biases of digitization, how can we contextualize our findings within the larger exchange system we know existed? In the digital humanities there has long been a discourse advocating “scalable” or “zoomable” reading that negotiates between scales of analysis, but how does this work in practice? How should analyses at scale—e.g. classification models for reprinted genres, network graphs of information flow, or aggregated data about formal trends in newspaper publication—inform closer readings of specific reprinted texts, genres, editors, or newspapers? We present models of the textual composition of newspapers, the prevalence of exchanges, the periodic circulation of information, and the spatial reach of different texts to provide a view of these broad structures and the individual editorial decisions that produced them. The overlapping of telegraphic urgency, literary judgment, and political partisanship with local and international concerns makes the nineteenth century newspaper a chimerical model organism with implications for earlier periods, and ideas about manuscript culture, to our present concerns about social media and mechanically multiplied patchworks of content.