Most archives keep what a scholar published. This one kept the act of writing: the same manuscripts saved again and again — bubble draft nov 5, nov 6, nov 9 — with every save date intact. Diffing the drafts recovers each revision as he made it: the sentence sharpened, the claim inserted, the paragraph struck out.
Every saved draft of the housing-bubble project · word count by save date
Each mark is one file he saved. The dense column in late 2008 — the crash unfolding in the news he was clipping daily — is the manuscript sprint shown below.
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]