What color is “computer”? What hue is “hummingbird”?
If individual words have colors, what would they be and how would you determine them?
The Color Code project by Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg uses an ordinary image search engine to determine the average color of 33,000 nouns.
Here’s a bit from the site’s FAQ on how it’s done:
“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.”
View the map here. Warning: it’s highly addictive, probably because the results are so unpredictable. For instance, “daffodil” is yellow (makes sense), whereas “wrist” is lavender. Go figure.
(link via Google Blogoscoped)
