Friday, June 22, 2012

The Seductiveness of Research

The delicate tinkle of wind chimes from the back deck, the gurgle of the coffee maker, and the hum of the refrigerator are my morning Montana music. The warm aroma of the coffee wafts across the cool air coming in from outside, twining with it until they both caress my nose. It's going to be a good day.

Dave is off on a walk, J, Mom and the dogs are still sleeping--Jig in with Jessie and Baxter in with Mom. Bailey, Mom's cockatiel, woken by my tapping on the keyboard as I sit next to his covered cage, has begun a drowsy morning song. I have been awake on and off since 4:24 (you know it's actually starting to get light here at 4:24 am, and it isn't dark till about 10:30--you gotta love summer in the far north) and I really need my coffee this morning.

Yesterday I didn't do much writing, but I did do a bunch of research reading and fact-checking for the section on color and color theory. I read the color theories described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435, Leonardo Da Vinci in 1490, and Sir Isaac Newton in 1704. From there I explored "The Munsell Color System" by T. M. McCleland from 1935 and read Munsell's own articles from The Psychological Bulletin in 1909 and The American Journal of Psychology in 1912 on the relation of the intensity of chromatic stimulus to chromatic sensation and a pigment color system and notation.  Munsell led to ordering copies of "Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light" (Guggenheim Museum) by Fred Licht, Nicholas Fox Weber, and "Interaction of Color: Revised and Expanded Edition" by Josef Albers, Nicholas Fox Weber. Then Dave brought up color and linguisitics right before dinner and...

...I got lost in the scholarly literature surrounding the misnamed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity and the effect of one's native language on color perception (and ordered a copy of "Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf"). From there I jumped to "Revisting Basic Color Terms" by Barbara Saunders, and began delving into Levinson's "Yeli Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms". I decided that, as much as I enjoyed Chomsky's principles of generative syntax in graduate school, I am not at heart a universalist, and I don't subscribe to the theories proposed in Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms"...


...and now today I have already spent three hours back lost in the research docs and on this post--and have written nothing in the book. I did add Zotero to my writing tools and integrated it with Scrivener, but I don't think that is enough of a win to justify the lack of productive word count. 


Think I should get writing for real? Me too!

6 comments:

Dee said...

get your butt back to WRITING - NOT falling down various rabbit holes of research that ultimately will suck more time than yield material....

can't WAIT to land in missoula!!!!! we are gonna have at least one day to go take photos of gorgeous scenery right?????

Bill said...

You've been researching for a year. Write. Write NOW!

Nancy Goodenough said...

Have you gotten into color spaces?

Did you know that red, yellow, blue are not the primary colors? Combining them they don't produce the full gamut. There are all sorts of primary color candidates for both additive and subtractive.

I'm getting into color space issues in photography. LAB is interesting.

Enjoy. I appreciate reading your research. You are a Renaissance Woman!

Nancy Goodenough said...

Oh ooooo. I'm in trouble now with Dee and Mr. Bill encouraging your research!

Bill said...

I AM NOT ENCOURAGING HER RESEARCH!!!

I am encouraging her writing.

Nancy Goodenough said...

Right. I'm the one getting in trouble with you guys because 'I' was encouraging her research. My sentence syntax was obscure. I should have diagrammed the sentence.