Deconstructor is a text manipulation tool similar to Dissociated Press or Travesty. It reads text files, gets an idea of how they are structured, and then produces new text resembling, but not exactly like, the original.
To produce a deconstruction:
• Choose New Deconstruction from the File menu.
• Choose the options you want, and click OK.
• Identify text files for the program to soak up.
• After you've absorbed all the source text you want, choose Generate Text
from the Edit menu.
Your source files should be plain ASCII. Deconstructor parses them into ‘links’. The links can be characters, syllables, words, clauses, or grammaroids. The syllabification is meant to work on English, but will produce acceptable results for other Latin-alphabet languages. The clause and grammaroid parsers seek major grammatical hinge points within sentences, and will work in English only.
The larger the link, the more meaning is preserved in the output. Using several files full of contrasting subject matter (i.e. quantum physics, cooking, religion, etiquette, and fly fishing), will yield weird results. Using the Suppression option stops the output from resembling the input too closely, and from repeating itself. Choosing triplets of links rather than pairs gives the output more cohesion.
If you choose smaller links, like syllables, and absorb a short list of terms from one area of knowledge - say, a lot of electronics jargon, political ‘isms’, or all your friends’ names - you will get a lot of nonexistent but plausible-sounding words. If you soak up a Swedish text in triplets-of-syllables mode, the output will be very genuine-sounding Mock Swedish.
If you start with texts in foreign languages, and use the Cipher editor to change the letters around, you can make believeable-seeming documents written in artificial tongues. If you are an artificial language fan, you can use the text editor’s sorting, counting, and unique-ifying tools to make lexicons. The unique-ifier removes repeated words from a selection.
Using the Palimpsest editor, you can hide short messages inside of longer ones, and recover them later, using the Open Special menu item. (To archaeologists, a palimpsest is a manuscript which contains another, earlier manuscript on the same writing surface, barely visible because it’s been erased.)
Open Special also allows you to impose the current cipher on an existing text file, or to remove non-ASCII characters (“gremlins”) from a file.
At any time, you can add more source text, suppress text, see the list of links, or get info on the state of your work.
Explore all the combinations of settings and sources. Run a little Shakespeare through. The program has only the vaguest familiarity with the English language, but it will occasionally say something you wish you had said first.
