De geboorte van een plein

The beginning is a foundational element in literary fiction: it is the entrance into a textual world. In this article, I analyse the genesis of the first chapter of Gie Bogaert’s born-digital novel Roosevelt (2016), which was logged with the keystroke logging software Inputlog. The beginning of Roosevelt supplies important information for the understanding of the textual world, takes on a key role in the ‘recentering’ of the reader to this world, and facilitates an immersive reading experience through the use of the second-person singular, and through making an appeal to the readers’ sensory and spatial imagination. Focusing on the textual development, I ask the question how four important aspects of the novel were implemented in the first chapter during the writing process. I will demonstrate how Bogaert experimented with explicating these aspects, but later decided to refer to them rather implicitly. Overall, this analysis demonstrates how Inputlog, in case it is used by literary authors, may facilitate textual genetic research on present-day works of literature.