Thinking on the page.

The two exhibits contain 25 surviving saves and 254 paragraph changes. Consecutive saves are compared by paragraph; strikes mark removed words and underlines mark additions. This is a window into the manuscripts, not a claim that every saved passage is a finished view.

The book exhibit follows the housing-bubble project: nineteen surviving saves, written nearly day by day while the real crash ran in the news. The Habermas essay is “Rhetoric, Reflection and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of Communication,” drafted across a single June weekend in six saves, Saturday to Monday.

Marginalia

The drafts carry his working marks in square brackets — a task loop with his research assistant, embedded in the manuscript itself:

[check page numbers] · [Sandy, sort] · [Book, Sandy] · [DONE] · [ok] · [gt]

Method

Files recovered from his drives were reduced by content hash to unique documents, and his own working papers separated from collected literature. Versions of each work were ordered by the dates in his filenames, then by original save time. Consecutive saves were aligned paragraph by paragraph.

Bibliographic churn (endnotes, citations) is excluded. Excerpts are trimmed to about 900 characters. Every count on this page is computed from the bundled draft data when the site is built.