Cover not available
Part of
A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 87–98

1.1.6
The twenty-first century

From paper notebooks to keystroke logging

In the twenty-first century, the digital medium has become an indispensable part of the literary writing process and can hardly be neglected in the study of the literary draft from this – yet very recent – millennium. In this chapter, we examine four manifestations of the twenty-first century literary draft on a spectrum ranging from fully analogue to fully digital: the paper draft of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the self-archived digital draft of Bart Moeyaert’s Het paradijs, the hybrid draft of Gie Bogaert’s Roosevelt, and the keystroke logging draft of David Troch’s story “Mondini”. These types of drafts offer their respective levels of granularity to examine the writing process, and especially the latter type of draft presents us with a hitherto unprecedented degree of detail, opening up the document’s nanogenesis.
Keywords: genetic criticism, analogue draft, digital draft, hybrid draft, born-digital literature, writing process, keystroke logging, nanogenesis
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The paper draft: Ian McEwan’s Atonement
  • The self-archived digital draft: Bart Moeyaert’s Het paradijs
  • The hybrid draft: Gie Bogaert’s Roosevelt
  • The keystroke logging draft: “Mondini” by David Troch
  • Conclusion: Levels of granularity
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (17)
References
Bekius, Lamyk. 2021. “The Reconstruction of the Author’s Movement Through the Text, or How to Encode Keystroke Logged Writing Processes in TEI–XML.” Variants 15–16: 3–43.Google Scholar
Bogaert, Gie. 2016. Roosevelt. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij.Google Scholar
Crombez, Thomas, and Edith Cassiers. 2017. “Postdramatic Methods of Adaptation in the Age of Digital Collaborative Writing.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 23 (1): 17–35.Google Scholar
Ghonem-Woets, Karen. 2012. “‘Het komt er in het hele leven op neer dat mensen gezien willen worden’: Een interview met Bart Moeyaert.” Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd 26 (87): 85–101.Google Scholar
Green, Dudley. 2005. Because It’s There: The Life of George Mallory. Stroud: Tempus.Google Scholar
Hayes, J. R. 2012. “Modeling and Remodeling Writing.” Written Communication 29 (3): 369–388.Google Scholar
Lindgren, Eva, Asbjørg Westum, Hanna Outakoski, and Kirk P. H. Sullivan. 2019. “Revising at the Leading Edge: Shaping Ideas or Clearing up Noise.” In Observing Writing. Insights from Keystroke Logging and Handwriting, ed. by Eva Lindgren, Kirk P. H. Sullivan, Raquel Fidalgo, and Thierry Olive, 346–365. Studies in Writing. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Mathijsen, Marita. 2009. “Genetic Textual Editing: The End of an Era.” In Was ist Textkritik? Zur Geschichte und Relevanz eines Zentralbegriffs der Editionswissenschaft, ed. by Gertraud Mitterauer, Werner Maria Bauer, and Sabine Hofer. Bd. 28. Beihefte zu Editio. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
McEwan, Ian. 2001. Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Moeyaert, Bart. 2020. Het hele leven. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij.Google Scholar
Ries, Thorsten. 2018. “The Rationale of the Born-Digital Dossier Génétique: Digital Forensics and the Writing Process with Examples from the Thomas Kling Archive.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (2): 391–424.Google Scholar
Troch, David. 2020. “Mondini”. Unpublished.Google Scholar
Van Hulle, Dirk. 2007. De Kladbewaarders. Nijmegen: Vantilt.Google Scholar
. 2021. “Dynamic Facsimiles: Note on the Transcription of Born-Digital Works for Genetic Criticism.” Variants 15–16: 233–243.Google Scholar
. 2022. Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vauthier, Bénédicte. 2016. “Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding Out the (Mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado by Robert Juan-Cantavella.” Variants 12–13: 163–186.Google Scholar
Vásári, Melinda. 2019. “Securing the Literary Evidence. Some Perspectives on Digital Forensics.” In Philology in the Making. Analog/Digital Cultures of Scholarly Writing and Reading, ed. by Pál Kelemen and Nicolas Pethes, 287–309. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Google Scholar