<p>This study applies computational methods for measuring semantic distances to born-digital drafts. Using text versions leading up to a short story by Flemish author Ellen Van Pelt, we are looking for relevant entry points into a born-digital genetic dossier. Several methods are applied and compared to consecutive pairs of drafts; a count of unique lemmas entering and leaving the working document, a document cosine similarity measure based on a BERT model of Dutch, and a narrativity measure. By comparing these different methods with close reading, we can assess whether such computational tools may be of help to textual scholars working with big corpora of digital draft material. The working process of Van Pelt could be divided into several stages with a different focus. The methods each partially picked up on these stages, and also highlighted specific drafts. It did not become clear which of the methods was most successful, in part because of the small corpus used, for a writing process that was characterised by gradual expansion and continuous revision.</p>