AI Group Collaborating with UC Irvine

^{October 3, 2011}
AI Group researchers will assist a colleague at UC Irvine in studying variations in color categorization among Pacific Rim cultures and in creating a public database showing how speakers of 116 Mesoamerican languages name different colors. The Mesoamerican Color Survey, collected between 1978 and 1981 by the late cognitive anthropologist Robert E. MacLaury, documents how cultures in Mexico and Central America categorize color and until now has been available only in hard copy. Kimberly A. Jameson, associate project scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, will work with AI Group researchers Paul Kay and Richard S. Cook to digitize the data. The project will provide open access to the survey for the first time. The data will be hosted at ICSI alongside the World Color Survey, a digital archive of data showing how speakers of 110 unwritten languages spoken around the world categorize color. The project is supported in part by the UC Pacific Rim Research Program >>