This is a belated post about my first week of Digital Writing Month. (www.digitalwritingmonth.com) I signed up, because I realized lately that between various digital projects (including websites) and grant applications for digital projects, I was doing a lot of digital writing. I thought I’d see if I’d actually get to 50,000 words.
There’s a substantial digiwrimo community out there, which I’m not really tapped into. I registered on the site, and I liked the Facebook page, but I haven’t participated in any of the collaborative projects. In part because I’m a loner at heart, in part because I’m simply so swamped with work, that the collaborative poem, novel, and other projects, are a luxury I can’t afford. But I love that the community’s out there, even though I’m not really involved. Knowing that it’s out there makes a difference.
I set up some guidelines for what “counts” as digital writing. These are totally idiosyncratic to me:
⁃ coding in websites or other digital projects (like XML files, GIS files, etc.) count only if I actually muck about with the code. Writing a blog entry like this, which I just type in or paste in as text into the WordPress interface counts for the words of text, but I don’t count the code, since I didn’t muck with the code.
⁃ writing about digital projects in grant proposals and conference presentations counts as digital writing
⁃ email most definitely does not count
⁃ twitter and fb should count, but I’m not sure I will be able to literally count them
⁃ significant editing to a file means counting all the edited section a second (or third or whatever time). Purists might quibble with this, but editing code or text means significant changes, it’s re-writing, and re-writing is writing.
During week 1, I wrote I don’t know how many words — the count will have to come tomorrow– on websites, grant proposals, XML files. I’m going to try to track them through word clouds, which I’ll post here.
Digiwrimo word count: 341
