/*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.
for more information on northText, please read the documentation.
northText was written in processing, for more information please see processing.org.
*/


northText takes its name from the various gel electrophoresis tests conducted in molecular biology. dna, rna, or protein molecules flow through a cross-linked polymer gel toward the cathode (-) or anode (+) depending on their charge: the smaller the molecule, the further it travels through the gel.1 western blots test proteins, southern blots (named after edward southern) test dna, and northern blots test rna. biologists use the latter to study gene expression.

we imagine the target text as the cross-linked polymer that will catch the words of the source text as the computer runs them over the target. the higher the frequency of a word match between target and source, the darker that word in the target appears, which we can read as one of the heavier words. less frequent words appear lighter. unlike the gel test, however, we have to the option of testing not only for concordance but discordance between the source and target. in that case, matches evanesce rather than darken and leave only those elements of the target that do not appear in the source text.

like a concordance, but between two texts, this text blotting procedure measures the affinity or disparity between two texts by letting one text catch the words of another as they fall through the net. one can test how similar two texts are by allowing the computer to color them. just how much overlap is there between a poem by an imagiste par excellence and the communist manifesto? one can also use this tool for the generation of new texts from the fusion of the two original. there’s also the possibility of reading the relations between the source and target just through their frequencies alla lotaria in calvino’s se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore .... there lotaria dissolves the texts of silas flannery in her computer to read them by parsing the least frequent, and therefore the least probable, the least anticipated words. those low probabilities, according to claude shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, contain the most information.