About Chromatics

I built Chromatics while struggling to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Knowing the English are the right people to turn to when scheming against the Irish, I recalled that the BBC’s broadcast system color-codes speaker dialogue. Color-coded dialogue makes it far easier for hearing impaired viewers to quickly jump into a rapid-fire conversation because the individual speakers “pop-out”, so to speak, especially as opposed to the American style of closed captioning:

[KATELYNN] I WANT TO HAVE PASTA FOR DINNER
[KATELING] YOU’LL HAVE SLEEP FOR DINNER

When reading literature I want to be swept up in the story. I don’t want to dedicate mental resources trying to remember if Mrs. Dashwood and Mrs. John Dashwood are in fact, different people!

So we give James Joyce the English treatment. Large language models make it easy to identify speakers with numerous aliases across hundreds or thousands of pages of text, and Project Gutenberg already offers the classics that are the starting point for this tech for free.

Someday, Chromatics will be a format available everywhere, but for now I’m reading everything my high school English teachers failed to assign.

And yes. I finished Ulysses.

— Max