Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.

The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

--Martin Wattenberg

View Color Code.



Image Gallery
View a range of still images taken from Color Code.

Frequently Asked Questions
More information about the project and answers to common questions.

Acknowledgments
Jonathan Feinberg created the algorithms and code to assign colors to words. The colors are derived from a Yahoo image search. The words and their relations were taken from the amazing WordNet database from Princeton, and processed with the help of the Java WordNet Library. I'm grateful for conversations and comments from Kushal Dave, Judith Donath, Marek Walczak, Laura Wattenberg, and especially Golan Levin.

About the artist

Martin Wattenberg's work centers on the theme of making the invisible visible. Past projects include the Thinking Machine series, the NameVoyager, The Shape of Song, the Whitney Artport's Idea Line, and Apartment. Wattenberg is a researcher at IBM, where he creates new forms of data visualization. He is also known for the SmartMoney.com Map of the Market. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley. More info