In our project we investigated the usefulness of color frequencies in identifying the period in which a poetic work was created.
We found that these features alone aren’t able to discriminate time periods with great accuracy, but by adding them a classifier we can get slightly better results. We crawled all poems available on Project Gutenberg-DE and we counted for each author how often they used any individual color name.
We showed that McManus hypothesis (frequencies of color usage correlates with Berlin-Kay color ranking) is not supported for German poetry.