  Results of electron-induced one- and two-nucleon hard knockout reactions,
$A(e,e'p)$ and $A(e,e'pN)$, in kinematics sensitive to nuclear short-range
correlations, are studied using the nuclear contact formalism. A relation
between the spectral function and the nuclear contacts is derived and used to
analyze the dependence of the data on the initial energy and momentum of the
knocked-out proton. The ratio between the number of emitted proton-proton pairs
and proton-neutron pairs is shown to depend predominantly on a single ratio of
contacts. This ratio is expected to present a deep minima in the initial energy
and momentum plane, associated with the node in the proton-proton wave
function. The formalism is applied to analyze data from recent $^4$He and
$^{12}$C electron-scattering experiments performed at Jefferson laboratory.
Different nucleon-nucleon potentials were used to asses the model-dependence of
the results. For the ratio of proton-proton to proton-neutron pairs in $^4$He,
a fair agreement with the experimental data is obtained using the two
potentials, whereas for the ratio of proton-proton pairs to the total
knocked-out protons in $^{12}$C, some of the features of the theory are not
seen in the experimental data. Several possible explanations for this
disagreement are discussed. It is also observed that the spectral function at
specific domains of the momentum-energy plane is sensitive to the
nucleon-nucleon interaction. Based on this sensitivity, it might be possible to
constrain the short range part of the nuclear potential using such experimental
data.
