Data 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.

A tartan's colour order is nearly its name

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reduce a tartan to almost nothing — six colours, and the order they run in, with every thread count thrown away — and you would expect to be left with something far too coarse to tell one tartan from another. Hundreds of designs ought to collapse together. They don't. In the Scottish Register of Tartans, that stripped-down colour sequence is very nearly a fingerprint.

What we kept, and what we threw away

We took the register-of-tartans dataset on its own — 7,393 setts — so that every match is two genuinely distinct tartans, not the same tartan re-listed across sources. Each stripe was quantised to the nearest of six base colours (blue, black, red, green, yellow, white), and the thread counts were discarded entirely. What survives is the Pattern: the bare order of coloured stripes across the half-sett, folded so a reflective sett and its mirror count as one. So B24 K8 G24 R4 and B6 K2 G6 R1 both reduce to the same four-colour Pattern, BKGR.