ΔTartan on Tartan Dictionary

Neighbourhood maps — a flat picture of a many-dimensional space

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Under the nearest tartans table, many pages in the Dictionary carry a small scatter — the neighbourhood map. Every grey dot is a cloth in the corpus, the red dot is the cloth whose page you are on, and the blue dots are its nearest neighbours. This post explains what the map is, and — just as important — what it is not.

Where the dots come from

ΔTartan describes each cloth by a bundle of measured features — its colour ladder, its proportions, how its sequence jogs against others — and measures the distance between two cloths in that feature space. That space has many dimensions: two tartans can differ in ground colour, in the shade of one overstripe, in the count of a band, in the order the colours cycle, in scale, each an axis of its own.

ΔTartan: how far apart are two tartans?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every cloth page in the Dictionary carries a nearest tartans table: the most similar cloths in the whole corpus, each with a number in the ΔTartan column. This post explains what that number measures — why a faded, two-hundred-year-old kilt sits a whisker from its own younger self while two tartans that share most of their colours sit far apart.

Judged the way a weaver would

A tartan is a small palette deployed in a strict order, and that is how ΔTartan reads it. Each sett becomes a colour ladder: its colours are grouped into hue families (red, green, blue…), ranked dark-to-light within each family, and split by prominence into the ground — the broad foundation colours that set the cloth's character — and the decoration — the thin overstripes and dark accents laid over it.