innerfictions

Sunday 24 May 2009

Grue/Yellow - Wisconsin 1931

"My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,
I work in a lumber mill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
they say, "What's your name?"
And I say,
"My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin..."

Beginning/end?




The English language makes a distinction between blue and green but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, whilst there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green[1]. Also, some languages treat light (often greenish) blue and dark blue as separate colors, rather than different variations of blue, while English does not.

How to ... divide experience into meaning? Semantic (colour) fields suggest objective landscapes to explore. But... perhaps colour is only in the mind. Mixing, translating ephemeral waves from "out there" in a colourless universe, "in here" to create colour and emotion. Anchoring ourselves in the real with the subjective. Mapping...

Serendipity... Semantic fields... semantic maps... There you are - under 27: Yon Yonsin; John Johnson....


Angelica township, WI - full map

Geo. A. Ogle and Co. / Standard atlas of Shawano County, Wisconsin




Grue: a single colour term covering both green and blue. Over half the languages in the World Color Survey contain a grue color term.

Contour plot showing the distribution, over chromatic stimuli, of best examples of grue terms in the WCS. Outermost contour represents a height of 10 hits; each subsequent inner contour represents a height increment of 10 hits. (Source: Regier and Kay 2004)

Saturday 23 May 2009

World Color Survey (WCS) stimulus array

The World Color Survey [WCS] is a research project that was undertaken to validate, invalidate or – most likely – modify the main findings of Berlin and Kay (1969) [B&K]: (1) that there exist universal cross-linguistic constraints on color naming, and (2) that basic color terminology systems tend to develop in a partially fixed order. To this end, the WCS collected color naming data from speakers of 110 unwritten languages. The data have recently been compiled into a unified data archive, available online.


The WCS stimulus array. The rows correspond to 10 levels of Munsell value (lightness), and the columns correspond to 40 equally spaced Munsell hues, from R2.5 in column 1 to RP10 in column 40. The color in each cell corresponds approximately to the maximum available Munsell chroma for that hue–value combination.



Contour plot of WCS best-example choices compared with best examples of English color terms. Berlin and Kay reported more than one best-example choice for several of the English color terms; all best-example choices are displayed here.

Whitstable


Monday 11 May 2009

Nostalgia IV

Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Whenever he tuned on his radio and listened to the news of the world, he would find himself imagining the words to be describing things that had happened long ago. Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as "nostalgia for the present".

Paul Auster, The Book of Memory



Friday 1 May 2009

Goodbye Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, etc...



Keeler.




Keeler Voluntary Fire Dept; Keeler.




Pontiac; Mount Shasta.




Chevy tow truck; Yreka




Chevy Impala + horse; Yreka



Happy Camp.




Dodge pickup; Happy Camp.














Derelict cars, California