I have played with ways to visualize textual sequence alignment in large collections of texts.

I have developed two experimental web applications as part of my research on the Oulipo. The first is an implementation of Harry Mathews’s algorithm for performing combinatoric operations over a set of structurally similar but thematically heterogeneous texts. The second performs Raymond Queneau’s matrix analysis on any text written in French. These programs are not written to process large amounts of text, but feel free to play with them. Let me know if you have any questions or problems using them.

I have used natural language processing tools to facilitate the invention of sonnets.