As a writer, I am very familiar with the idea of revision. Over the years I have learned the absolute necessity of revision in the writing process. I now know that I would not be the writer I am today if I hadn't sat through many workshops of my work. But when I was younger, I thought that revision meant the same thing as editing. I thought it was changing some commas and deleting or adding a sentence or two. It wasn't until I started taking writing classes that I learned that revision is a lot more than just making a few changes; it is challenging yourself to push your work to greater heights. Revision is accepting the fact that everything we create can become better and better with more time, effort, and an open-mind to suggestions/criticism. Of course, part of the revision process may also lead to some failures and wrong choices along the way, so that is why it is very important to keep records of all drafts and changes that you (or someone else) makes to a piece of creative work.
I bring up my experience with revision as a writer because of its connection to Stolley's discussion of revision in his article and the introduction to the topic of version control that was discussed in the Github tutorials. In the Github tutorials, I actually learned what version control is. I learned that it is basically revision to code that tracks the changes made to it as it changes over many drafts. I understand the importance of tracking changes made to a work because sometimes we as writers realize that actually a few drafts back had a better scene than the most recent draft does. But version control is also important because digital media usually involves collaboration with other people, so it is very important that everyone can look at the content and understand what changes were made by someone else and why. Stolley stresses the importance of "slow and steady improvement of existing work," which is offered to creators through the use of lo-fi production technologies, like Github. I am still a little confused about how this works in practice (even after the "Hello World" tutorial), but I hope to learn more about version control in this class, and I will make sure to remember the importance of revision.
