About and scope

About this collection

The Global Color Meaning Database is a small, citation-ready reference on how the meaning of color changes across cultures, centuries, and markets. It is the curatorial and reference arm of a larger research program in the quantitative anthropology of color: a program that asks whether what people value, prefer, and read into a color is shaped less by the eye than by history, society, and price.

The name Suse is short and plain on purpose. It is a quiet handle for a reference meant to be cited inside other people's work, not a brand meant to be noticed on its own. The mark beneath the wordmark carries the collection's six core hues as six small discs.

Skeins of wool dyed with natural indigo, lac, madder, and tesu, hung in rows. — Wool dyed with natural indigo, lac, madder, and tesu, Himalayan Weavers, Mussoorie. Public domain.

How its reach is measured

Impact

A reference like this is not measured by downloads. It is measured by the people who build on it: contributors who add or revise records under the stated standard of evidence, and the scholarly works, syllabi, and datasets that cite the collection or one of its records. Both counts start at the founder and grow only as real use accrues, so neither is posted here as a number, because an invented figure would defeat the point. A teaching module built from these records is a useful secondary output, not the measure of the work.

Who it is for

Audience

Students writing about color and culture, designers and translators who need a sourced claim rather than a folk belief, researchers who want a citable anchor for a cross-cultural claim, and anyone who has noticed that the same color can mean opposite things in two places and wanted to know what the research actually says.

What it will not do

Honesty

It will not tell you what a color "really" means, because colors do not work that way. It will not present a single culture as standing in for the world. And it will not show you a survey number the fieldwork has not earned: the numbers on the records come from wave 1 of the project's own interviews, carry their sample size, and claim nothing beyond the people actually interviewed.

What is real here, and what is open The published sources, the structure, and the citations are real and resolve. The fieldwork layer is real primary data: wave 1 of The Color Testimony Project, eight recorded interviews conducted by the curator in summer 2026, documented with instrument and cleaning notes on the fieldwork page, with wave 2 under way from September 2026. The archive is built to published standards and precedents, and the page says plainly which standards are met and which are not. A named faculty advisor remains an open step and is shown as a labeled placeholder, never as a fabricated endorsement.

Founder and Lead Curator: Chloe Chen. Record text licensed CC BY 4.0; cited sources remain under their own terms. Updated 2026-09.