https://www.tartandictionary.org/tags/neighbourhood-map/Recent content in Neighbourhood Map on Tartan DictionaryHugoenSun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/neighbourhood-maps/Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/neighbourhood-maps/<p>Under the <strong>nearest tartans</strong> table, many pages in the Dictionary carry a small scatter — the <strong>neighbourhood map</strong>. 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.</p> <h2 id="where-the-dots-come-from">Where the dots come from</h2> <p><a href="https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/deltatartan/">ΔTartan</a> 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 <strong>feature space</strong>. 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.</p>