Inklings
What color is Shakespeare?
We translate writing style into color, shape & interaction. A stylometric atlas you can see, play, and write into.
Stylometric atlases for human readers.
Computational stylometry has long been able to tell two authors apart, but its outputs (n-gram tables, principal components, embedding distances) rarely reach the reader who would benefit from them most. Inklings proposes a perception-first translation of stylometric features into colour, shape, and direct interaction.
Each author becomes a blot: hue encodes a perceptual style profile blended from algorithmic, language-model, and crowd signals; silhouette encodes a five-axis fingerprint; canvas position reflects projection-based similarity. Four interlocking surfaces (The Inkwell, The Blots, The Blotting Game, and The Quill) let readers and writers explore, annotate, and steer style as a sensory object.
We contribute (1) a multi-source style-to-colour mapping that triangulates algorithmic, LLM, and human signals; (2) a crowd-fed evaluation loop that turns stylistic agreement into open data; (3) an editor that surfaces stylistic shift as colour drift, with diff-style suggestions toward a chosen hue.
A canvas for something invisible.
Writing style is hard to describe
We say a sentence is dense, dreamy, clipped, or baroque, but the words slip the moment we try to compare.
Stylometry tools are numeric & inaccessible
Tables of n-gram frequencies and PCA dimensions hide what readers actually feel on the page.
Readers & writers struggle to see style
Without a shared sensory language, stylistic similarity stays an inkling, never a picture.
We translate writing style into color, shape & interaction.
Each author becomes a blot. Its hue tells you what their prose feels like, its silhouette encodes a numeric fingerprint, and its place on the canvas surfaces neighbours you didn't know you had.
A hue is a feeling.
From numeric stylometrics to a single perceptual color: warm and grounded, sharp and cold, dreamy and slow.
A silhouette is a signature.
Lexical richness, sentence length, abstraction: the points of the blot bend to match a profile no two authors share.
A page is a conversation.
Pan the inkwell. Guess a hue. Write a line and watch its color shift. Style stops being a thing you talk about.
From corpus to canvas, in five stages.
A pipeline that keeps the numeric guts and the perceptual surface honest about each other. Tap a stage to read its role.
Public-domain literary works ingested from Project Gutenberg, cleaned, and tokenised. Per-book and per-author groupings.
The Inkwell
explore literary identity through color
A pan-and-zoom atlas of authors. Each blot's position reflects stylistic similarity, color encodes a perceptual profile, and a side panel reveals the stylometric fingerprint and nearest neighbours of whoever you tap.
- Three projection modes: classical stylometry, modern embeddings, pure colour.
- Hover a blot to preview the author; click to pin a full profile.
- Stylometric profile bars: lexical richness, sentence length, abstraction, formality, narrative pace.
- Nearest-neighbour list ranked by stylistic distance.
A pioneer of modernist literature, Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style and deep exploration of inner life redefined the novel in the twentieth century.
- James Joyce0.08
- Marcel Proust0.11
- T.S. Eliot0.14
- Franz Kafka0.16
- Samuel Beckett0.18
The Blots
every book is a swatch
A browseable grid of works. Each card resolves four parallel readings (algorithmic, language-model, crowd, and the consensus blend) so you can argue with the data and watch it answer back.
- Four colour readings per book: algorithm, LLM, crowd, blend.
- Stylistic histogram at a glance: distinctive lexical bands per work.
- Filter by era, language, genre, or stylistic neighbourhood.
- Click into any blot for full provenance: which signals voted which hue.
The Blotting Game
a daily stylistic guessing game
Read a passage. Pick the hue you think it bleeds. Every guess feeds the consensus ink. Over time the crowd teaches the system what readers actually feel, and the system teaches you what your eye keeps missing.
- Three modes: Smudge → Swatch, Smudge → Wheel, Twin Smudges.
- Daily streaks and seasonal leaderboards keep readers coming back.
- Every guess is anonymous training data for the crowd channel.
- Reveal screen shows author, algorithmic colour, and the crowd's mean hue.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions.
The Quill
watch small edits shift your stylistic hue
A writing surface with a live readout. Type freely and your prose surfaces a colour. Pick a target hue and the Quill suggests gentle edits (softened intensity, grounded imagery, paced calm) and shows them as a side-by-side diff.
- Live hue readout updates as you type.
- Choose a target colour to receive directional nudges, never rewrites.
- Side-by-side or inline diff highlights what changed and why.
- Each suggestion is labelled with the stylistic dimension it shifts.
Alice was beginning to grow drowsy in the warm afternoon, sitting on the bank beside her sister, with so little to do but watch the clouds drift by.
Aim for the target. Suggestions appear inline.
Fresh, natural, and grounded. Calm, clarity, gentle observation.
- • Softened or reshaped intensity
- • Adjusted clause length & rhythm
- • Re-tinted imagery toward target
A five-dimensional fingerprint.
Every author and every book gets the same five-axis read. We map those numbers to colour and shape so the differences become something you can see, not just compute.
Type–token ratio over rolling windows. Higher = wider vocabulary in fewer words.
Mean and variance. Hemingway clips, James spirals; both visible at a glance.
Concrete vs. abstract ratio drawn from psycholinguistic norms. Calvino floats; Carver lands.
Register signals (contractions, modals, latinate roots) fused into a single axis.
Verbs per clause, scene–summary ratio. The tempo a reader actually feels.
An atlas drawn from public-domain prose.
Built on Project Gutenberg and an open extension set. Targets v1 corpus by July 2026, growing toward multilingual coverage and reader-contributed annotations.
Standing on prior ink.
- Burrows, J. (2002). 'Delta': a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship.Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(3), 267–287.
- McInnes, L., Healy, J., Melville, J. (2018). UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection.Journal of Open Source Software 3(29).
- Reimers, N., Gurevych, I. (2019). Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks.EMNLP 2019.
- Lindbloom, B. (2003). Useful Color Equations: perceptual colour spaces and difference metrics.brucelindbloom.com.
- Albers, J. (1963). Interaction of Color.Yale University Press.