Color Me Intrigued: Quantifying Usage of Colors in Fiction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantitative approach to analyze color usage in fiction, revealing trends like increased noun concreteness over time and proposing future computational methods for literary color analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology for measuring color-related attributes in literary texts using human ratings and explores temporal trends in color usage.

Findings

Significant increase in noun concreteness over time.

Use of Glasgow Norms for color attribute measurement.

Proposes future directions for computational literary color analytics.

Abstract

We present preliminary results in quantitative analyses of color usage in selected authors' works from LitBank. Using Glasgow Norms, human ratings on 5000+ words, we measure attributes of nouns dependent on color terms. Early results demonstrate a significant increase in noun concreteness over time. We also propose future research directions for computational literary color analytics.