Unlike physical drafts, digital generic materials are less faithful to metadata such as date. For example, if one forgets to put the date inside the note, one loses that information if the note is copy-pasted to a new location. In word processors, if changes are not tracked, they all vanish to extinction. Therefore, tracking changes in a digital draft requires intentionality, perhaps more than what is expected in physical drafts. What digital tools miss in protecting metadata it fills up by making sure the content and the files themselves are durable. As long as they are constantly backed up using multiple methods, digital drafts are protected from the wear and tear typical to their paper counterparts.
Some drafts were not meant by writers to be published. The Talahardin is different as it intends to publish unfinished works.
Unprocessed
Digital notes published in a digital garden are different from traditional drafts
- digital gardeners create works in progress with the intention of publishing it online. Traditional drafts are usually discarded or kept from public’s eyes until a later date
- as a whole, the garden is never finished
- Each note is never finished but develops towards a certain maturity, whose criteria is usability rather than finality.
- Of course, the garden can hold both traditional drafts in electronic form as well as “finished” publishable manuscripts
- But the most important difference is the intention to publish as much species as possible
- A second difference is that, except for versioning and intentional backing up of each change, and using github, versions of electronic text are faster for extinction because of the allure of fastness that tech provides.
- Personally, i dont want to be uber obssessed with saving every tiny version of my work. I like how working with electronic files makes it easy to create copies and versions but also tapers one’s need to do so because of the fluidity that the efficiency of working with e files affords.