Simplex-Wide Screen Shots

Now obsolete, this is posted as an example of the simplex-wide approach to recombinant text.

Shown is a component (edgeText) of the EDGE toolkit (evolutionary design by genetic engineering). You can start it directly from the release page [link deleted].

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A published text does not have to be frozen, fixed and unchanging. Instead, as in life, it can evolve. Nature provides living organisms with a mechanism for change based on genetic recombination; and this application provides a similar mechanism for published texts. Bio-metaphorical data structures and peer-to-peer communications enable pieces and facets of text to be created, swapped and recombined like genes. Recombination gives rise to unique variations of the text, in separate working copies. Each working copy [one per writer] is like a unique individual in a population...

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Figure 1.  The application presents the text as a tree of nested XHTML elements (white area). Genetically related texts are shown in an adjacent population space (black area) which is traversed using the diagonal scroll bar at bottom-left. In this example, a single paragraph gene is graphed across the population space, and its variations are revealed in a series of vertical chromographs to the left.

Figure 2.  Shows a particular variation of the paragraph. A gamete (thin white line) is selected from the population, and its genotype projected into view, temporarilly replacing the user's text. The user can rapidly switch between the two variations on the screen, to get a sense of how they differ. The shading of the chromograph cells matches the sequence of genes in the the user's text. Out-of-sequence variations appear as banding. Novel genes that are not present in the user's text appear in black.

Figure 3.  The text after recombination. The sequence of genes now matches that of the selected gamete (thin white line). The text itself is not identical (compare with the previous figure) because supergenes, such as this paragraph gene, carry only structural information; they do not encode the detailed content of their subgenes. In this case, immediately following recombination, some of the content no longer makes sense in its new ordering. The phrasing still needs to be cleaned up.

Figure 4.  Here the user has selected a particular phrase, and graphed it across the population. Variations are revealed as a series of horizontal typographs to the bottom. The user may select any one of these, and recombine it into the text.