A letter groove
Cut-up artists' books from digitized manuscripts (2022)
November 2022
A generative art application that takes digitized book pages delivered via IIIF manifests and selectively removes words to reveal the pages beneath, producing compositions in the style of artists' books. Created for National Novel Generation Month 2022.
How it works
The tool consumes IIIF manifests—structured metadata describing sequences of scanned pages from digitized collections. For each page, it runs TesseractJS to perform optical character recognition, identifying every word and its bounding box on the page image.
Words are then selectively removed from the page, cutting rectangular holes that reveal a second page layered underneath. The result is a palimpsest: text fragments from the top page float over the imagery of the one below, producing unexpected juxtapositions between text and illustration.
The frequency of word removal and the pairing of pages are configurable, so the same manuscript can yield very different compositions depending on how aggressively text is excised and which pages are layered together.
The official NaNoGenMo entry used 99 pages from Harvard's digitized copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson.
Other source material
The tool works with any IIIF-compatible collection. Some other manuscripts tested include natural history illustration plates, sheet music, botanical illustrations, and Emily Dickinson's manuscripts.
