Colour Spinner: Coordinated Multi-view Visualisation for Cross-Linguistic Colour Communication

Sinkeviciute, Akvile, Stutters, Jonathan, Ahmed, Rafique, Koliousis, Alexandros and Mylonas, Dimitris (2026) Colour Spinner: Coordinated Multi-view Visualisation for Cross-Linguistic Colour Communication. In: IEEE VIS 2026, November 8-13, 2026, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. (In Press)

Abstract

Colour naming links vision and speech. While most humans share trichromatic colour vision, the number and structure of colour categories vary across languages. A colour that attracts strong naming consensus in one language may lie at a contested boundary in another, and colours that are easy or difficult to name can respectively highlight or obscure information in data visualisation. We present Colour Spinner, an interactive visualisation system featuring six coordinated multiple views, Picker, Namer, Thesaurus, Translator, Mapper, and Profiler, for visual and audio exploration of empirical colour naming distributions derived from crowdsourcing and field studies in American and British English, French, Greek, Spanish and OtjiHimba. Selecting a colour propagates synchronously across all six views, revealing how naming confidence, semantic closeness, translation uncertainty, category extent, and behavioural, geometric and linguistic properties shift across linguistic communities. Colour Spinner also supports perceptual accessibility through simulation of colour vision deficiencies and age-related vision changes. A task-based evaluation with bilingual participants demonstrates the system's effectiveness for inclusive cross-linguistic colour communication.

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