Text starts out with the first press of a button on the keyboard, followed by another and then another. During the composition of a text, the author might develop several variants of an expression and discard some other portions later. After a long series of manipulation operations, the writing tool saves the final result. Without tracking each individual character change as the most atomic element, versioning can only be done retrospectively with heuristical diffs as after-the-fact analysis, which can be wrong, incomplete, misleading and can never reconstruct the chronological order.

To be continued…

Video about the Java implementation of the Change Tracking Text Editor.

Related material: FIXING ELECTRONIC LITERATURE at 8:42, OSMIC, Jaron Lanier from 22:15 and Bravo from 14:11.

Related books: "Track Changes" by Matthew Kirschenbaum and "The Work of Revision" by Hannah Sullivan.

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