Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Color Portrait of Language

This is very interesting; the Color Code project by Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg found the average color of 33,000 nouns by using an image search engine. You can cluster the view by meaning or color, and you can also search for specific words. Go straight to the image gallery if you don’t have Java.

A little background on how the colors were determined from the site:

“For each word, we performed a Yahoo image search and retrieved 50 image results. (If fewer than 50 images were found, we deemed the word too obscure and discarded it.) Then for each image we averaged the values of the pixels in the middle and then averaged those 50 results. We brightened the colors slightly for display.”

Here are some colors for specific words:

[Via David Weinberger]

Also see: Patternizer.

Color Portrait of Languag ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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