coloring books

I worked on Coloring Books, a project to see the colors of literature with three other students at Hack@Brown. Over the course of eight hours, we designed and developed the site, during which I was primarily responsible for calculating the colors in different works of literature. I developed a Python script to find the frequency of colors in each story. The frequency values are then mapped onto the site. For instance, Little Red Riding Hood is displayed in all red, because red is only the color mentioned in the story.

The colors were beautiful to visualize, but we were also interested to explore if color could be embedded in the words themselves. For instance, what color is sadness? Using Google's word2vec model, we processed raw text to find words that are closely associated with each color.

A rainbow of my favorite word-colors:

Edgar Allan Poe: universe attack if, wherewith apart three day dignified unusual singularly-marked

A Picture of Dorian Grey: orange wry beetle spasm town, chests welled hell brown, defeats lamplit

The Yellow Wallpaper: yellow thought course, spots of henry design wall, pattern lie feeling

The Great Gatsby: green slowly wised go surviving ticked cody towel continued sang, much

Moby Dick: blue another get one little still it, two thing last without

Lovecraft: purple scramble sure rattling trunk outside; according sunlight 1692, mouths substance

Frankenstein: white wallet attentions chains, fight, disappointment, complaints? august, judge, pursuit renewing

Les Miserable: grey immense garden, covered allowed forth night, violent english yet outside

Jane Eyre: black little one must would like you, never me, could still

This project was an intersection of our group’s interest in design, literature, and the cool things word2vec can do. It was my first hackathon and I loved the energy. The process of creating, coding, and last-minute problem solving was exhilarating.

You can view the site or the code to color your favorite book!