Your Favorite Novel’s Color Signature
io9 reports on graphic designer Jaz Parkinson’s Color Signatures, a project graphing the visual content of classic novels:
These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says ‘dark ash covered everything’ (not an actual quote), that image evokes dark grey instantly in the mind, so dark grey gets a tally. They are then ordered into a spectrum and drawn up, so the result is a surprise to me until it is done. I was shocked at The Road as well! A lot of the colour is fire, and when they finally find some food the book describes ‘juicy glistening peaches,’ which is so visual after pages and pages of grey.
Above is one of my favorites, Alice in Wonderland. For the rest, click here. Jaz has a queue of books ahead of her and takes requests.
Tagged: data visualization, fiction
Read the post: http://bit.ly/10RQ0vo
The Gods In the Trunk, or Chauvet’s Remnants - November 21, 2011
Speaker: Colin Dayan, Robert Warren Penn Scholar at Vanderbilt University
Hosted by Kaiama Glover, French Department, Barnard College
Reflecting on both the productive and the dangerous convergences of the spiritual and the political in Haitian author Marie Vieux Chauvet’s fiction, scholar, journalist, and activist Dayan offers an exploration of “the wrinkle in the business of divinity” — the revealing interplay of matter and not-matter, of defilement and exaltation at the crux of personhood. With Chauvet as her prompt, Dayan moves to rethink our understanding of the “supernatural” by questioning the context of the sacred and the meaning of accursed objects.
(Source: youtube.com)
Alan Cheuese’s latest novel weaves together a story of the brutal history of slavery in Africa with that of a family of Jewish slaveowners in pre-Civil War America. We talk with Cheuse about the inspiration for his latest historical novel as well as the challenges, and rewards, of being a prolific reader and writer.
