It was early in 2013 and really I’d had enough.

A novel of mine had come out in 2011, and another in 2012, and now I was supposed to sit down and start another? I bridled. The solitude of novel writing, the grating solipsism of the form – strapping yourself alone to the industrial word loom – felt oppressive. Writing a novel at that point seemed like wallpapering a dungeon. In short, I was lonely.

Reacting, I sought to make my writing life more collaborative, to spread my wings in other fields. I co-wrote a screenplay, which got made into a film. Inspired by some amazing work, I ventured into digital literature with an app, Reptile Resistance, written collaboratively and crowd-funded via Unbound. I started teaching writing more, and lecturing on the Publishing degree at Oxford Brookes University. I was mitigating the loneliness of writing long form prose by collaborating in a broader suite of texts and activity.

Still, although the prospect of writing a novel was oppressive, I really did have a story to tell and I knew that sooner or later I’d have to overcome my resistance to the loneliness of writing in order to tell it.

My friend Mark solved the problem. I told him about the tribulations of the word loom. Also, because of working at Brookes, I’d been thinking more about scholarship, specifically about how early drafts of contemporary books – once upon a time hand-written or typed – were now just being written over, dissolved into the rolling palimpsest of computerised text.

Mark solved both issues in a stroke. ‘Stick a bit of malware on it.’

‘What?’

‘Stick some spyware on your computer.’

He meant that if I put some malware, or spyware, on my computer to note everything I did, it would record all changes made to an evolving manuscript, plus it might offer a weird kind of company for me in my wallpapered dungeon.

Good old Mark.

So, in April 2013 I approached the digital curation team at the British Library, offering myself as a guinea pig, offering to have a piece of spyware put onto my computer to track the writing of a novel – every wrong-turn, reappraisal, edit, mistake, not just recorded, but time and date stamped. Immediately, the British Library saw the scholarship possibilities in what I proposed and we negotiated a contract where (to put it crudely) the data was theirs but the resultant book was mine.

It became quickly obvious that to save us from running into privacy issues, I would need a separate machine on which I only wrote the novel. That was no problem. I’m not the world’s richest guy so I bought a pretty basic reconditioned laptop and used only that.

The curation team chose a piece of keylogging software called, Spector Pro about which Jonathan Pledge, a curator of contemporary archives at the British Library has recently written:

After installation on a host computer, Spector Pro works by running undetected as a background application and cannot be accessed via the normal Windows user interface (it is not visible in the Applications folder). Access to the programme is by a default keyboard combination Control-Alt-Shift which brings up a password dialog box. The password is set by whoever installs the programme.

As keylogging software Spector Pro is not terribly sophisticated and seems to have been specifically designed for low-level company surveillance of employees, potentially without their knowledge. It is possible to run Spector Pro as a visible programme but this would seem to negate its original stated purpose.

Spector Pro can track and record chat conversations (as transcripts), emails (sent and received), websites visited and, most importantly for this project, keystrokes made, not only what has been typed within an application; but mouse and keystroke usage across the whole computer system.

I visited the library and had the software installed on my empty computer and I set to work. Over the next 42 months, while I laboured through what turned out to be a very difficult novel, I visited the British Library on eight separate occasions, to allow them to download the data. My last visit was March 2018.

So, what do we have?

We have information on keystrokes typed:

This shot shows the raw data usage as a list. By far the largest number of keystrokes concerns writing/typing as well as work on editing (Find & Replace) with the remainder comprising system activity including backups.

And we have thousands of screenshots, one captured every few seconds each time activity on the host computer is detected.

From the moment the computer is logged into until the moment it is shutdown. Screenshots allows an output as either still images (.jpg or .BMP) or as black and white video (.avi).

And we have text outputs:

Text output from ‘Keystrokes Typed’ for a single tracked session. As seen from the detail below the header provides information on the Application used, the start of activity and the title of the file being worked on. The greyed text represents the tracked movements with typed words rendered in bold. Time stamps are given, with the green text signalling the start of activity and red the end.

In total we have generated 222GB of data, captured across 108,318 Files.

What are we going to do with it?

Well, I’m not going to do anything with it, I don’t have the skills or the motive. But the data is out in the public domain now, under a Creative Commons BY licence, running free here.

But if you are a scholar of digital humanities, or a digital artist or creative visualizer, be my guest, see what you can find to do with it. The data is there to be played with.

During the writing I never asked about the data, about what was going on ‘under the hood’. I had no access to the software on my computer and I had no sense at that time exactly what it was recording. And while I never knew what it was doing, it helped with my problem. I managed to start again, by making the practice of longform fiction into something that felt collaborative, not only because the software was sat there recording, but also because of the digital curation team who were taking the data.

Sure, it was a mind trick – I was still essentially alone at the desk – but even though I knew it was a mind trick, that didn’t matter, I was able to begin to write fiction again. As Paul Simon wrote, ‘Once I was crazy but my ace in the hole was that I knew I was crazy.’

I have been asked if knowing that the work was being recorded made me self-conscious, and, sure at first, I was minding my Ps and Qs a bit, trying to seem like a more competent writer than I was. I remember at one point I even looked up the spelling of a word on another computer so that I could type it correctly into the spyware computer.

But that didn’t last. I relaxed and soon I actually quite wanted my mistakes to show. It seemed like an act of solidarity with the writers I was teaching, to show them what I had often told them, that writing is born from repetition, that every writer has blind spots – shonky spelling, flimsy characters, poor plotting – and that only re-writing cures. It seemed generous to show the tottering beginnings of what most people would only consume as the finished article.

But not only that. I forget about the keystroke software recording my every move because of the story itself. I wrote earlier in this piece that it was a difficult novel to write, and that was because I aimed to write as simply and truthfully and compassionately as I was able. Aims I found to be not as readily available to me as I would have flattered myself to hope – compassion and truth not really having been the modus operandi of my younger self.

As I wrote, I forgot about the keylogging because the difficult writing became immersive – as I hope the reading of it will be – because my story and my characters – Tony and Laney, Jo and Nick – absorbed me, and in the end it was their story that cured me of my loneliness, the keylogging project was just the booster to get the journey started.

I don’t feel a need to perform this experiment again. If someone wants to wire me up or whatever I will dutifully agree if it will help them with what they have to do, but personally the need and the moment have passed. Collaborative work is embedded now across my broader practices and actually, every now and again, in a busy house in a busy world, strapping myself alone into the world loom seems like a respite.

Staying On is published by Duckworth 18^th October

Bath Spa University’s Graduate College and the British Library invite applications for a fully funded AHRC PhD studentship on the topic of ‘Digital Publishing and The Reader: Interactions between Readers and Writers of Creative Texts in Digital Environments’.

Closing date: 23:59 (GMT) Monday 2 May, 2016.

Interview date: Tuesday 17 May, 2016.

The studentship will begin on 1 October 2016.

About the Collaborative Doctoral Award

This studentship is for three years full-time study at doctoral level, with the option of an additional six months training or placements.

The student will have all fees paid, will receive a bursary for living expenses, and will also be supported in necessary travel and conference costs. The student will be jointly supervised by Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator and Ian Cooke, Head of Contemporary British Published Collections, of the British Library, and Kate Pullinger, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, and Dr Laura Little at Bath Spa. At the British Library, the studentship will be located in the Digital Scholarship and Contemporary British Publications teams. The student’s investigation will operate within Bath Spa University’s regulatory framework for research degrees.

The purpose of this collaborative research project is to investigate the changing nature of publishing in digital environments, with particular emphasis on examples which encourage interaction between readers, texts and authors. The research focus of the project is located in library and information science and publishing. Through focused case studies, it will provide policy-relevant research for the British Library on issues related to collection-building and representation of cultural activity in Britain. This project fits within the AHRC ‘Digital Transformations’ research theme, in particular examining emerging media and ‘communication and creativity in a digital age’. Its focus is on examining the interaction between readers and authors, and the role of new technologies in shaping these interactions. The changing nature of UK publishing is central to this research, and it fits firmly within the RCUK’s ‘Digital Economy’ theme, including topics such as: the reproduction and dissemination of knowledge; new forms of expression; changes in publishing; and notions of authorship. The project would address three specific questions:

• Technology change in digital publishing, including new technologies and reuse of existing technologies to support interaction between readers, texts and authors.
• The impact of technology change on behaviours of readers and authors and their interaction with texts;
• The significance of these changes for memory institutions, in particular questions on collection building and other activities to represent these changes in reading and authorship behaviours and technologies.

Digital technologies are transforming reading, writing and publishing, creating multiple opportunities for writers and readers interested in experimentation and innovation. Within a few years, all emerging writers will be expected to be engaged with new forms and/or platforms as well as new ways of connecting with audiences. But what does it mean to write text for a screen? What happens to literature once it moves off the page and into a web-browser, onto tablets, mobiles and other devices? As the digital and physical merge, what territories will literature explore? As interaction between readers, writers, and texts becomes more fluid and pervasive, existing across multiple platforms and modes, how will the life of a text be captured and represented by memory institutions like the British Library? Currently, reader-writer interaction is seldom captured and archived alongside the text, though engagement with writers and their texts online is a hugely popular activity with large and vibrant communities and networks already existing.

Any research project that addresses questions around technological change in reading and publishing must also address the impact of these changes on authors and texts. Situating this collaborative doctorate within Bath Spa’s creative writing department – a department that is unusual in its in-depth engagement with digital technologies – will give this researcher unprecedented access to researchers and practitioners in this field. For instance, within the time period of the doctorate the student will be able to run in-depth on-going case studies looking at the writing process, pre-publication, publication, and post-publication reader engagement of books by award-winning literary writers like Prof Tessa Hadley, Prof Philip Hensher, Prof David Almond, Prof Maggie Gee, and Prof Fay Weldon. Case studies could examine the role of technology plays in all these key stages, from writing to reader engagement across book festivals, social media, social reading and whole ecosphere of publishing currently. As well as literary texts, case studies could be built around the work that Prof Kate Pullinger and Prof Naomi Alderman do in the field of digital fiction, games, participatory writing projects, and collaborative texts.

Benefits and training opportunities for the student

Locating this research at the British Library provides a means of framing it within a national cultural and collecting context. From the point of view of research-informing-policy, it will enable the researcher to tackle questions that could not be practically addressed elsewhere. The British Library is both a major publisher of digital works, through large-scale digitisation projects and the creation of online learning platforms (such as Discovering Literature), and has been involved in collection management of digital objects at large scale. In addition, recent work on data, digital scholarship and the creation of BL labs has created an environment of innovation in new digital publishing, well-suited to the themes of this project. The student would be located in the Contemporary British Publications team and work with colleagues in Digital Scholarship and Web Archiving. The student would draw on staff expertise and experience in developing and delivering an online learning course, crowd-sourced projects, and managing born-digital collections.

The UK Web Archive, which the British Library manages, could be used as a source of longitudinal information on recent change in online publishing. There would be scope to develop a themed collection within the Web Archive to reflect digital publishing technologies in a context relevant to the PhD research project. The project would also be a close compliment to the ‘Academic Book of the Future’ programme, in which the British Library is a partner. There are strong thematic links between this project and the CDP on issues such as: author engagement with new technology platforms; how changing social and technological environments impact on research and publishing; and the opportunities and challenges raised by new collaborative practices in research. The duration of the studentship provides a time period within which to identify change in digital publishing, and to see specific publishing projects develop. More generally, the student would be encouraged to contribute to the cultural engagement activities of the Library through development of an interactive and collaborative text project. At Bath Spa, the student will have access to research training via the Researcher Development programme, which consists of a suite of courses, workshops, activities and online materials informed by the work of Vitae and their Researcher Development Framework.They can attend staff development sessions organised by the Academic Staff Development Centre. The School also sponsors a range of events and activities, including visits from publishing industry professionals and writers.

Supervision, management and procedure

Supervision will be carried out by Pullinger and Wisdom, with monthly joint supervisory meetings at either the British Library or Corsham Court, where Bath Spa’s Graduate College is located. Additional involvement from Cooke and Little will take place at regular intervals throughout the academic year. The PhD will be hosted by Bath Spa University and will conform to Bath Spa’s doctoral regulations, including the award of the final degree.

The research timetable of the PhD student will be confirmed at the approval of the student’s Research Plan, which must be submitted within three months of the start date.

Funding details

The duration of the PhD studentship is three years, full time, subject to satisfactory progress, with an additional funded six months for industry placements or research training. The stipend will be paid at the standard research councils’ rate. For 2016/17 the annual stipend is £14,296, plus an extra £550 that is added to the stipend for AHRC CDP students to help towards additional costs incurred by the need to work across two institutions. The British Library will provide financial support for research-related costs of up to £1,000 a year. If the PhD is not submitted for viva within 3.5 years, the student will become liable from that date onwards for Bath Spa’s pro-rata fees and/or continuation fees.

Person specification


Essential

• Undergraduate degree in related discipline
• Masters level qualification in related discipline or professional equivalent.
• Proven ability to work independently

Desirable

• Experience of working with digital publishing or archiving
• Demonstrable knowledge of the current landscape of digital reading
• Experience of working collaboratively with individuals and organisations

How to apply

Full details of how to apply can be found here.

Prospective candidates wishing to informally discuss an application should contact Kate Pullinger at Bath Spa or Stella Wisdom at the British Library.

Enquiries about the application process may be directed to PGR Admissions.