Academic prototyping, like ethnography or bench studies, is a way of producing new knowledge about an idea. It is a phase in a critical process. In fact, it is perhaps better to speak of academic prototyping, rather than of academic prototypes. In this paper, as an example, we discuss the Dynamic Table of Contexts, an academic prototyping project that has served for many years as a focus of ideas about what it means to remediate and improve on a venerable print tradition.