textApart

an attempt to reveal the structure underlying textual meaning

This project seeks to strip away the dominant, semantic aspects of a text and explores and expresses its purely formal qualities, the underlying skeleton of the text. TextApart is a Processing application that visualizes the structure, rhythm, and phonetic patterns of a collection of words. TextApart displays the selected text in a series of views, where the text is abstracted into shapes and patterns. Stacks of word-shapes and identify repeaters, uncommon word-shapes swell and common word-shapes shrink. By comparing text, we can discover the differences and similarities in what's hidden under the message-- in the mechanics of the text. In these examples, texts by Henry James and Brittany Spears are visualized and compared.