Born Digital Material

I feel like this article on the age of word processing and archiving it is a culmination of sorts of what I have been harping on in this class on the discussion board.  How do we research the impact of word processing when the original words in the document have long since been updated, backspaced, and corrected?  As I type now and blogger constantly checks and alerts me to misspellings (and Word with grammar and spelling), I wonder how this is already affecting literary output.

As a big fan of David Foster Wallace, I often wondered if the man, before he hung himself, was worried that his born-digital material would be archived.  Updating is making our lives impossible.  We update and update and now we can't use the updated material because the version that they sold us originally is incompatible with the "new and better" version.

But here, on the other hand, is an unbelievably unique way of studying art and literature and the thought process involved.  One could have never imagined being able to look over Cormac McCarthy's shoulder as he wrote All The Pretty Horses to see how and why he used certain paper and when and why he decided to make corrections to the original manuscript (though I think things like that shouldn't be touched due the mysteriousness and power of writers such as McCarthy).

I'm in awe and I'm in utter shock.  But one thing is certain.  There is no other way now to save this information.