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Part of
Progress in Colour Studies: Cognition, language and beyond
Edited by Lindsay W. MacDonald, Carole P. Biggam and Galina V. Paramei
[Not in series 217] 2018
► pp. 179–208

Chapter 10
ColCat

A color categorization digital archive and research wiki

| University of California, Irvine, USA

The ColCat Wiki (http://​colcat​.calit2​.uci​.edu/) is a multidisciplinary research platform featuring a new corpus of color categorization survey data from a variety of languages and language dialects. The Wiki’s contents can be examined, searched, downloaded and extended through non-commercial scientific investigations of human color categorization behaviors across ethnolinguistic groups. Launched in 2016 to make available unpublished raw data from Robert E. MacLaury’s color categorization archive, the ColCat database and its Wiki interface continues to grow and evolve as a public-access teaching and research platform for collaborative scientific investigations on color categorization behaviors. The ultimate aim of the ColCat Wiki is to serve as a repository of color categorization data and a collaborative workspace. This article summarizes properties of the wiki and its data, including database features that permit novel empirical research in the domain of global color categorization.

Keywords: ColCat Wiki , color categorization, color naming, Mesoamerican Color Survey, World Color Survey
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Robert E. MacLaury color categorization archive
    • 2.1MacLaury’s Mesoamerican Color Survey
    • 2.2MacLaury’s Multinational Color Survey
    • 2.3An overview of some specific ColCat Wiki Database features
    • 2.4ColCat research participants
    • 2.5Summary of the archive’s data collection tasks
  • 3.ColCat and WCS surveyed regions compared
  • 4.Three important research directions possible using the ColCat archive
    • 4.1Exploring how color lexicons vary across dialects of a given language
    • 4.2Investigating normative color naming patterns when only a small participant sample is available
    • 4.3Analyzing color lexicons that might reflect alternative cognitive emphases compared to hue-based color categorization systems
  • 5.Using the ColCat Wiki and some file formats available for download
    • 5.1Digitized computer-addressable data for download
    • 5.2Other ColCat data available for download
  • 6.Typical file organization formats of ColCat data in scanned .pdf image files
    • 6.1Naming task image files
    • 6.2Focus task image files
    • 6.3Color term mapping task image files
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.217.10jam
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Bosten, Jenny M.
2022. Do You See What I See? Diversity in Human Color Perception. Annual Review of Vision Science 8:1 ► pp. 101 ff. DOI logo
Jameson, Kimberly A. & Michael A. Webster
2019. Color and culture: Innovations and insights since Basic Color Terms—Their Universality and Evolution (1969). Color Research & Application 44:6 ► pp. 1034 ff. DOI logo
Lindsey, Delwin T. & Angela M. Brown
2021. Lexical Color Categories. Annual Review of Vision Science 7:1 ► pp. 605 ff. DOI logo

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