Lots of people have been making great new visualizations of our color names data. Here are 4 more that folks have sent us.

Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student at CMU HCI, combined our data with results from his own previous experiment, and created beautiful flower and spiral images. Unlike my and Martin’s color wheels, hue is scaled along the radius, creating a striking effect.

Next: network and cluster diagrams from David Sparks, Ph.D. student at Duke PoliSci. The layout below was computed from a similarity metric on color names. (I’m unclear whether it’s on labels or colors.) Size of node corresponds to the label’s frequency.

All of the visualizations so far have had to map three-dimensional color points into a 2D space. But Jeff Clark in Toronto went ahead and wrote a 3D explorer — you fly around a space of the color labels. He built it with the excellent Processing framework.

Finally, yet another tack: instead of creating a picture with all the labels, why not fit labels to a picture? Kristina Durivage, Chris Burg, and Scott Olson did that for an undergrad CS project at Winona State University. Their software takes any image and overlays color names. An example:

Four new visualizations in a month — whew!

To look at all our color posts, check out blog.doloreslabs.com/topics/colors.

-Brendan

Martin Wattenberg at IBM Research took our color names data and made a cool new cloud view:

Instead of plotting each individual color name like in the original, he grouped together identical names, took an average position, and sized the word by frequency. That’s why the more common names like “red” and “green” are large. This really helps readability (and, I’ll admit, the black background works a bit better :))

Thanks to Martin for sending this on!

I just packaged and released the data set for our color names experiment. It has 10,000 color/label pairs.

This is the download link. Read on for more details:

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What would you call these colors?

We showed thousands of random colors like this to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said:

The above picture contains about 1,300 colors and the names for them that Turkers gave.  Each is printed in its color and positioned on a color wheel.  Just looking around, there sure seem to be different regions for different names.  But there are also rich sets of modifiers (”light”, “dark”, “sea”), multiword names (”army green”), and fun obscure ones (”cerulean”). To help look at all this, we also made a color label explorer, so you can search for different terms and see different parts of the space. If the link doesn’t work for you, here are a few examples:

This study is basically the same design as the famous World Color Survey, where anthropologists showed color patches to speakers of many different languages and asked for names, to test the universality of language.  Of course, we have mostly native English speakers. However, we can get much more data.  (The above picture and links use only a small percentage of all the colors and names we collected.)  There’s tons more that can be done. Want to make a better visualizer?  Statistical analysis of colors to name terms?  Let us know and we should be able to get this data set online.

UPDATE 3/18: I posted the data set.

-Brendan