A Study in Scarlet

"A Study in Scarlet" is a work that visualizes the relationship between kanji and color names.

This work visualizes the relationship between the kanji used in the color name and the color the color name represents by breaking down the color name into individual kanji. One of the Japanese color names is "深緋". The word "深" means deep, and "緋" means scarlet. This is because "深" modifies "緋", evoking a deep scarlet color. In this way, color names expressed in ideograms are easy for Japanese speakers to imagine.

I visualized this attempt through three works. In the first work, I decomposed the Kanji characters used in color names, calculated the average color of the colors in which those Kanji characters are used, and placed those Kanji characters in the HSV color space.

In the second work, color names were used as nodes, and edges were used to connect color names that used the same kanji characters, visualizing them as a network structure.

In the last work, I visualized the same network structure as in the second work, but I laid out the color names on the hue circle.