northText v1.0, 2008
john carpenter, james pulizzi, and jeremy schmidt
design | media arts at the university of california, los angeles

interactive demo

/*northText v1.0 was developed by john carpenter, james pulizzi, and jeremy schmidt as part of UCLA ENGL250 (media theory for the 21st century) taught by professors n. katherine hayles & rita raley. special thanks to professor hayles and raley for help with the conceptual development of this work and to D|MA professor chandler mcwilliams for his assistance with the coding. northText was written in processing.
*/

the concept for northText is based on DNA microarray tests in molecular biology. in this work, instead of testing for hybridization between DNA strands, the software tests for concordance between two bodies of text. the source text is broken apart word by word, and then "run over" the target text. if the source word matches a word in the target text, it "sticks" and darkens the corresponding target word's opacity. these tests differ from typical concordance (word count) studies in that they allow the user to quickly gain a visual understanding of words in common while maintaining one of the text's appearance (layout, word order).