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In the contemporary academic communication system, academic communities see themselves organized by a global regime of editorialization in which publishing practices tend to focus on designing processes of transformation rather than particular, well-shaped artifacts. In this context, digital data formats act as middlemen and prescribers for an array of esthetic, semiotic, and epistemological possibilities. They define what can be written, read, or manipulated, and therefore act toward the constitution of the human and non-human collectives that use them. This contribution studies the agency that formats have on the experience of academic work, and the influence of these formats in the constitution of contemporary academic communities. It does so by analyzing the phenomenological, social, and political implications of digital formats being used in current academic publishing: TeX, XML/TEI, and Markdown.