Meyer: You don’t advance many, or any, theories about how the word processor led to any kind of stylistic change. I wanted to give you the opportunity to let you go further than that. Was there any change you think you observed?

Kirschenbaum: Well, I think that work could be done, but it wasn’t my work. I imagine somebody who was interested—particularly nowadays with what we popularly call digital humanities—somebody who’s interested in a particular writer, assembling their corpus. We have great text analysis tools that allow you to do all kinds of stylistic analysis, and someone could certainly do it.

My real question would be, not so much could you do it, but: What would it tell you? If you were able to ascertain that so-and-so’s use of adjectives either proliferated or diminished after their word processor adoption, well then what? What comes after that?

There was a recent study in The Atlantic, actually, where a couple of my colleagues, lit professors elsewhere, did a study of people who had been through MFA programs. They wanted to know if the MFA made a stylistic difference, and the upshot was no, or at least not in any way they could isolate. And the conclusion they came to, rightly, was that the MFA was much more about a process of professional socialization than it was about actually encroaching on any stylistic tendencies they had. And that seems right to me.

My view on this is that writing is a very multi-dimensional, complex kind of activity. There are lots of different things that account for what we abstract as a writer’s style. A computer, or whatever the instrument of composition is, can certainly be one of them, but so can all kinds of other things going on in a writer’s life, the writer’s biography, his or her physical environment, the circumstances under which the book is being written, the audience for which it’s going to be written—I don’t believe in the project of isolating any one variable, and certainly not a technological variable, as the causal agent in a process that’s as rich and complex as that one is.

Meyer: Where would someone who wanted to research this even start?

Kirschenbaum: You would want a writer precisely like Asimov, where there’s sufficient documentation that we can really—I mean, in Asimov’s case, it’s quite literally that we can pinpoint to the day when he gets his computer. Then you would assemble your corpus. You would want digitized copies of a lot of the books before and a lot of the books after, and then you would see what you could find with your algorithms.

I think much more interesting than doing that for one individual writer would be the prospect for doing it for a community of writers. So, science fiction—which we were talking about earlier—was a relatively small community at that time. There were a few hundred people probably making their living actively writing science fiction in the early 1980s, and a lot of them knew one another. They were friends, they were rivals, but they all sort of knew each other and knew what they were up to. Reading other people’s work, collaborating—when you have a community with those coherent social relations, introducing the question of technological disruption, as we now say, of course that would be interesting to look at.