About Nanogenesis Digital
Nanogenesis Digital is a platform that publishes visualisations of keystroke-logged writing processes. It takes its name from the text-genetic perspective it promotes. Genetic criticism is a field within textual scholarship that focuses on the temporal dimension of writing and considers a literary work as a process rather than a product. It aims to construct knowledge about the writing process, and manuscripts are seen as the material traces of an author's creative invention. Writing in a digital environment allows a high degree of freedom during the writing process; the writer can move through the text to make changes without leaving a trace. When this process is captured with a keystroke logger, such as Inputlog, the writing process can be studied at an unprecedented level of granularity, including this non-linear behaviour and the sequentiality of text production and revision. Nanogenesis is therefore the study of the fine-grained, sequential writing actions and movements involved in text production and revision as captured by keystroke logging.1
Visualising Keystroke Data
Inputlog logs every keystroke and mouse movement in Microsoft Word together with a timestamp and the position in the document. Additionally, the tool saves the Word document at the start of each writing session as well as at the end of the session (the ‘session versions’). The most fine-grained level of output provided by Inputlog is the General Analysis, a tabular representation of keystroke data. This output is not well-suited for a text genetic analysis, which aims to study the revisions and text production within the context of the text that has already been written (the text produced so far). To overcome this proble, the writing actions as present in the keystroke data can be encoded into the session versions. Nanogenesis Digital presents the visualisations of these encodings, that allow for seeing all the modifications made within one writing session at a glance and replaying the writing session.
Nanogenesis Digital is developed and maintained by Lamyk Bekius. She received generous help from Floor Buschenhenke, Vincent Neyt & Joshua Schäuble.
The writing processes currently available on the platform were logged as part the project 'Track Changes'.
About Track Changes
The research project 'Track Changes: Textual scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing' applied new methods, including keystroke logging, to gain insight into the literary writing process of today, which largely takes place on the computer.
What traces does this digital work process leave behind, and how can we use modern techniques to document and analyse the writing process?
This project brought together digital humanities, cognitive writing process research and textual scholarship. Textual scholarship has a rich tradition, which has yielded many insights into the working methods of ‘analogue’ writers from the past. Cognitive writing process research contributes insights and methods that are based on experimental data, including the ‘live’ recording of the digital writing process. We wanted to discover where and how the writing processes of contemporary authors fit within the framework of the textual genetic tradition, and where we need new models and frameworks.
Track Changes was financed by the Humanities Free Competition of the NWO, and was a collaboration between Huygens Institute and the University of Antwerp.
1See: Bekius, L. 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. DOI: 10.4000/variants.1245; Bekius, L. 2023. ‘Behind the computer screens’: the use of keystroke logging for genetic criticism applied to born-digital works of literature. Doctor of Philosophy in Literature. Amsterdam/Antwerp: University of Amsterdam and University of Antwerp. HANDLE: 10067/1986730151162165141;