If I could create a bot that changes the world, I would make a color bot.
In a Harvard Mental Health study, researchers found that participants who experience depression see colorless vividly than those who do not. According to the journal, “ The researchers also found a significant association between severity of depression (as measured by standard clinical instruments) and perception of contrasts,” (Harvard Health Publishing). It can also be said, that the use of colors can dramatically alter a viewer’s understanding of the piece they are viewing. Regardless; color matters and it impacts the way we experience the world. However, losing your sense of color is devastating.
A long time ago, I used to live for colors. It was the colors I saw that defined the feeling I experienced and the words that I could not describe. An outing with my close friends could be described as a warm red that hummed from the hot ramen we would enjoy, and the time I spent alone in my room on a cool summer day breathed in and out from the tranquil aquamarine wallpaper to the subtle rays of yellow that would bounce through my window ceil. By being aware of colors things become more vivid and bearable. But, after I experience depression, the only colors I could see were muted tones. What once was warm red is now just the dull red of the ramen broth and what I once embraced as tranquil blue, can be described as the blue-gray that defines my loneliness.
When colors lose feeling, such as warmth and calm, you are just left with a dull picture of the world. Despite this tale of woes, the feeling that color can give should not be limited to your eyesight. A color-blind person will never experience red the same way a person without does. Colors do not have to be seen. I think there is another way to view them and this is what my bot does.
My bot is called the Vibrant Bot, but it does not show colors- it describes them. Using a large collection of colors, quotes, excerpts, and poems my bot displays color descriptions that use adjectives and nouns to describe colors, descriptive words that invoke feelings, or a quote about color and then posts them to Twitter every morning. The objective is for the viewer is to imagine colorful emotions that match the description or appearance of colors being described. Even if a person loses their sense of seeing color, this bot will ensure that it will not change their experience with color.
To make this bot, it would require two resources and some tenacity. This bot uses a color collection database (aka. a color dictionary) that can be found online. It uses only the names of colors from the list of Crayola names, as well as a few hex code titles. An example of some names this data set generates is, “ash gray” and “banana blue,” collected from a Kaggle Dataset (Tatman) and a GitHub color repository (codebrainz). I selected these resources because they provide colors as well as adjectives to describe them. This pairing of nouns and colors gives a vivid description of what the color would look like with only two words. Compared that to simply calling a color “yellow” or “gray” especially since color is a spectrum and individual understanding of colors can vary widely.
Another element of this bot is its use of literature and quotes that are highly descriptive to paint an image in the viewer’s head. While some quotes may not use color in them, the language creates a self-designed color associated with the mood and objects being described. For example, “dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies,” (“QuoteLyfe”) and “As romantic as a Monday Morning,”. Unlike the last dataset, the inputs of these quotes are collected across several websites and books. The results are then put into python anywhere manually. The goal of each quote is to invoke emotions that paint a vivid picture of the thing being described, such as a Monday Morning or a dragonfly. The more vivid the quote, poem, or excerpt the more likely the viewer is to experience the underlying colors that may not be expressly written out. It gives the viewer the chance to create their own color associate through the words rather than being told the color to see. For example, each person has their own understanding of the colors on a Monday morning for some, it may be a romantic gray-blue that falls with the rain, for others it may be a pure black and white spiral that can be worn like a cloak. Regardless, the colors are seen and that is what the bot is going for.
Every Morning, this bot will post one of the colors, quotes, poems, or excerpts entered into the database. This entire process is done through pythonanywhere.com. While it may take time to completely collect the input data, the results will change the way individuals, literally, see the world. In this case, showing is worse than telling, because a person struggling to see does not need to be reminded of that fact. Also, seeing color being depicted with words rather than through a digital image is novel and can spark a person’s passion for site seeing and random gazing. To show that color can be described and is not limited by eyesight may change the way depression, color blindness, and other ailments are understood.
Tagged #writing sample.