Abstract
Based on word-color associations from a comprehensive, crowdsourced lexicon, we present Lexichrome: a web application that explores the popular perception of relationships between English words and eleven basic color terms using interactive visualization. Lexichrome provides three complementary visualizations: "Palette" presents the diversity of word-color associations across the color palette; "Words" reveals the color associations of individual words using a dictionary-like interface; "Roget's Thesaurus" uncovers color association patterns in different semantic categories found in the thesaurus. Finally, our text editor allows users to compose their own texts and examine the resultant chromatic fingerprints throughout the process. We studied the utility of Lexichrome in a two-part qualitative user study with nine participants from various writing-intensive professions. We find that the presence of word-color associations promotes awareness surrounding word choice, editorial decision, and audience reception, and introduce a variety of use cases, features, and opportunities applicable to creative writing, corporate communication, and journalism.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | DIS '20 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Pages | 477–488 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781450369749 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 3 Jul 2020 |
| Event | Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2020 (DIS '20) - Eindhoven, Netherlands Duration: 6 Jul 2020 → 10 Jul 2020 https://dis.acm.org/2020/ |
Conference
| Conference | Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2020 (DIS '20) |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | DIS '20 |
| Country/Territory | Netherlands |
| City | Eindhoven |
| Period | 6/07/20 → 10/07/20 |
| Internet address |
Keywords
- Visualization
- Qualitative user study
- Word-color associations
- Text construction
- Lexical discovery
- Creative writing