As part two in a series (part one is
here)
about the online color thesaurus and the interactive color zeigeist, we
should go back over five years to the original online color naming
experiment. This
simple experiment
dates back to the almost web 1.0 days of 2002 and was an unconstrained
color naming experiment in English. This was one of the first web-based
visual experiments that we tried and given the large number of
carefully controlled laboratory studies on the topic of color naming,
it seemed like a good place to start. I did decide up front to try to
avoid the whole universalist versus relativist
debate.
First we took a 6 by 6 by 6 sub-sampling of the RGB cube to get 216
colors. From this 'web-safe palette' we then randomly selected seven
colors for a given page view.
The obsever instructions were: “Please use the best possible color names for the following seven color patches.”
Which as many people used the comment box to point out to me was note
very specific. But this was actually the point. I was curious how
people would answer the question out of the blue on the web without any
laboratory constraints to use a specific vocabulary. One anonymous
volunteer noted: "I wasn't sure if you wanted accurate or poetic names."
Quite insightful. Looking at the figure below then we have random sets
of seven colored squares being sent out around the world using them web
and then being binned or named by people. The size of the colored boxes
below the map is scaled to relative usage so there are lots more
answers with 'green' in them than say 'orange'.
The results were quite encouraging. We got three orders of
magnitude more volunteer particpants than we had ever gotten before for
any of our previous visual experiments. In addition, the correlations
for the hue and the lightness agreed with the previous laboratory
studies as well as these studies agreed with each other. The results
for chroma or vivdness are a different story and probably merit their
own post. These are the hue correlations as compared to Berlin and Kay
centroids.
So we ended up with over 20,000 color names from around the
world. We also translated the original web page to over 20 other
languages and continued to collect data. What next?
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