The creation story for this is really neat. This could be an amazing tool in the school setting, especially for people that teach in university writing centers. This isn't just asking an author for a peek behind the curtain, asking a few questions about what they were thinking at the time of writing, this is Breaking the Magician's Code level stuff!
I am curious to see who is (brave enough?) to show their writing process in all its glory.
I'd be happy to upload scans of one of my more recent short stories, "Pink Paint Rain," simply to show how much true effort goes into massaging lines and language a la code.
I have about 7-10 print outs of the story with mark ups. Before switching to English & Creative Writing I was in Computer Science and pretty skilled with C++ at the time, so I can come up with a decent correlative:
Every version I printed was like running it through a compiler - this is to evidence that even if a piece of code or a line of text is functional, is it efficient, and, if at all possible, an excellent construction? These are subjective concepts that are innate in language. There may be several writers who can put words to paper directly from their head with no revision process - hell, it's what I do when I'm "practicing" on my IBM Selectric III to commit to writing in permanence (think before I type) - but for the greats, it has always been an iterative process.
To keep this from being all about me, allow me to provide a link to something that may be to your liking:
Hi, I'm a computational linguist and I would find it really great if some people could share their traces of their typing/editing process.
In programming, we have editors that have strong support for writing because we know exactly what the semantics of code is, and what good operations for editing/refactoring are. With writing prose, the best we currently have is edit histories from wikipedia articles, which are on a much larger timescale and full of things that should not be part of the editing process (vandalism, NPOV wars, etc.)
I am curious to see who is (brave enough?) to show their writing process in all its glory.