Just in a spirit of playing around, and exploring large data sets without any preconceived questions or assumptions, I thought I would throw a few words at
Locating London's Past and the
Old Bailey dataset, and see if any patterns emerged. And it occurred to me that words for colour, when mapped on to eighteenth-century London, might come up more frequently in some parts of town over others - perhaps 'white' in neo-classical areas, and 'brown' or 'green' at the more rural boundaries.
I am not sure that anything actually emerged, but it was fun to think about.
The base measure against which you would want to compare these colour distributions would be all crime locations (34,000 or so) mapped by street.
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| ALL CRIME LOCATIONS, BY STREET |
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| RED |
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| BLUE |
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| GREEN |
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| BROWN |
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| YELLOW |
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| WHITE | |
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| BLACK |
Is there a pattern there? I have not really got a clue, so I thought I would put together some combinations, just on the off chance, and following a naive assumption about how colour might work in an eighteenth-century urban context (where bright colours were expensive).
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| RED, BLUE, YELLOW |
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| BLACK, WHITE |
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| GREEN, BROWN |
I was still not quite convinced, but thought I should have one last go with the data displayed as 'Large Blocks', and by further combining 'manufactured colours' and 'natural' ones.
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| RED, BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE - LARGE BLOCKS |
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| GREEN, BROWN - LARGE BLOCKS |
Or finally, the same sets of results with the sets of colours subtracted from one an another.
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| RED, BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE, MINUS GREEN AND BROWN- LARGE BLOCKS |
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|
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| GREEN AND BROWN, MINUS RED, BLUE ETC - LARGE BLOCKS |
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| THE TWO COLOUR SETS MINUS THEIR OPPOSITE OVERLAID ('MANUFACTURED' VS 'NATURAL) |
Does this prove that 'manufactured' colours were more common in the West and East End, while 'natural' colours dominated in the northern and north-western suburbs. No, it does not. But it made me wonder.
