The sociology of the text has been instrumental in the development of the discipline of book history, but it has also had (and is still having) an impact on genetic criticism. This chapter argues that a rapprochement between both disciplines can be mutually beneficial, exploring a sociology of writing. Joyce was well aware of the ‘human agency’ involved in his literary enterprises. He had a knack for finding all kinds of textual agents to help him produce his works. The increased attention to human agency beyond the myth of solitary authorship has had quite an impact on textual scholarship, including in Joyce studies. The chapter discusses how this development impacts on our study of the writing, reading, revising, editing, and archiving of Joyce’s works, as well as on the ways in which we present them in the digital age, enabling a next generation of Joyce scholars to examine not only the teleological development of Joyce’s works towards a published text but also the dysteleological dead ends, the ‘vestigial’ notes that did not make it into Joyce’s published texts yet played a discreet, but no less valuable, role in the creative ecology of Joyce’s writing practice.