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.
In relation to this, unless versioning tools are used, such as Git, electronic drafts are lost faster to extinction because of the allure of fastness that tech provides. That said, personally, I don’t want to be super obsessed about saving every tiny version of an electronic file. 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.
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.
Most drafts are not meant to be shared to the public by their writers. The Talahardin is different as it intends to publish unfinished works.
Unprocessed
- 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
Scandura, Jani. “The Matter of Drafts.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Paula Rabinowitz, Oxford University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.205
Most contemporary writers work directly on the computer so that revisions are often buried in computer memory