About Discerner

Discerner helps researchers gain clear vision and deep insight into text comparisons. Our comparisons reveal patterns that improve understanding, interpretation, and application of texts. They suggest networks of influence and habits of thought. We compare all kinds of texts:

literary and artistic
philosophical and religious
legal and political
medical and technical
business and marketing

We're ready to help with your project! If you need a comparison of your own texts, request a quote. We also publish comparisons of popular texts in our online library. If you'd like to know when new comparisons are available, subscribe to our news and notifications.

Discerner runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The front end is a responsive web application written primarily in HTML, CSS, and javascript. The back end is a massively parallel software service written primarily in C#, SQL, and javascript. Our databases contain millions of matches from trillions of comparisons between millions of words. Our algorithms can process millions of statistical comparisons per second. Take a look at our help section to learn more.

Lincoln Cannon is CEO and founder of Discerner. He is a technologist and philosopher, and a veteran of high tech industries in leadership, consulting, and entrepreneurial roles. In 1998, as part of his studies in philosophy at Brigham Young University, Lincoln published a computer-assisted comparison of the Bible to the Book of Mormon. In 2006, he completely automated the process for a new version of the comparison. In 2015, Lincoln generalized the process for application to any text comparison and founded Discerner.