Lamyk Bekius | Genetic Criticism applied to born-digital works of literature

Lamyk Bekius | Genetic Criticism applied to born-digital works of literature | Track Changes: Textual Scholarship and the Challenge of Digital Literary Writing | Huygens ING (KNAW) and University of Antwerp, department of Literary Studies | prof. dr Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens ING/UvA), prof. dr Dirk van Hulle (UAntwerp) and dr Mariëlle Leijten (UAntwerp) | November 2018 – October 2022 | lamyk.bekius[at]huygens.knaw.nl

Up until now, literary scholars working in textual scholarship studied the genetics of literary texts that where produced using analogue methods. However, contemporary literature is produced within an environment where digital methods dominate; the NWO-funded project Track Changes: Textual Scholarship and the Challenge of Digital Literary Writing therefore investigates if and how this medium change affects the creative process of literary writing. My subproject Genetic Criticism applied to born-digital works of literature explores to what extent the traditional textual genetic methodology can be applied to a born-digital work and where the methodology needs to change. It will focus on the following research questions:

  1. How can we apply existing methods and theories of textual scholarship to analyse digital writing processes and in which ways will the analysis of digital writing processes enrich the existing methods and theories?
  2. How can we systematically extract intermediate versions of a born-digital text and how can we apply intelligent digital text analysis on these text versions and create new knowledge about the genesis of texts and the creative process?

The research will study the genesis of the novel Roosevelt (2016) by Gie Bogaert. The complete writing process of Roosevelt was logged with the keystroke logging software Inputlog. As a result, it provides us with types of data we have not been able to retrieve in the past. The keystroke logs will be analysed by concentrating on two levels, which have been conceptualized in the methodology of genetic criticism as ‘exogenesis’ (the interaction between the text and ‘external’ source texts) and ‘endogenesis’ (the writing of drafts).