Mapping metaphors of wealth and want: a digital approach

The AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project aims to provide data on the extent and development of metaphor across the history of English. It uses the full database of the Historical Thesaurus of English, which extensively categorises and classifies the recorded vocabulary of the English language from Old English to the present day. By using this database to map semantic categories onto one another, and thus showing lexical overlap in different conceptual fields, we aim in the project to provide results which will demonstrate the widespread, systematic and far-reaching impact of metaphor on English.<p></p> This paper outlines the digital and linguistic methodologies used by the project, and presents a case study of the semantic categories of wealth and poverty, demonstrating the metaphorical links between these categories and the rest of the language. In addition, we discuss the nature of lexical overlap as we use it in the project, and discuss both the quantitative and diachronic dimensions of the data we are manipulating and their implications for projects of this type.<p></p&gt

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus: a new resource for investigating metaphor in names

The AHRC-funded ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project has traced the development of metaphor in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day using the unique evidence base of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Historical Thesaurus organises the contents of the OED semantically, making it possible to see how vocabulary for any given concept has developed over time. One of the major outputs of the Mapping Metaphor project is the online Metaphor Map, which can be used to investigate metaphor in names and is freely available at: http://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk/

Creativity in the primary curriculum

Abstract not available

Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century

In lieu of an abstract, here are the chapter\u27s first two paragraphs: Everyone thinks they know the plot of Robinson Crusoe. The story of the man who is shipwrecked on an island alone is ubiquitous and feels deeply familiar, even for those who have not read it. Robinson Crusoe has been plagiarized, cannibalized, and serialized almost since the moment it hit the streets of London in 1719. Here is a passage from an Argentinean novel by Victoria Slavuski published in 1993 that captures the sense of familiarity and also the distance twentieth-century readers have in their relationship to Robinson Crusoe: “On days like these we promised each other that at long last we would take the time to read the copy of Robinson (Crusoe) that each household kept alongside the Bible and Twenty-five Ways to Prepare Lobster, written on Juan Fernandez by Amelita Riera. Nobody got past page fifteen of Robinson and almost nobody opened the Bible.”1 Literary critics often treat the multitude of twentieth-century versions of Crusoe as antagonistic to Defoe’s character. They tend to consider contemporary novels or films or poems as entities in competition with Robinson Crusoe’s fictional world. However, these modern renderings are never so neatly drawn. More often than not, writers use these alternative Crusoes to forge lines of affiliation and empathy, between the eighteenth century and our own time as well as between different regions and languages. Argentinean, Caribbean, and African Crusoes are in conversation with one another as much as they are in dialogue with the historic Defoe. Writers around the globe adapt and transform Crusoe and Defoe’s novel to establish a literary web of connection that has come to define our own global moment where fiction travels beyond national and linguistic borders. In this chapter I will move through a few observations on nineteenth-century Crusoes before delving into the twentieth-century map of literary islands crisscrossing the globe

Future information environments: deserts, jungles or parks?

This paper discusses the basic functions of a common information environment and how they are supported by metadata. Several distinct categories of information landscapes are described, characterised by the availability and quality of metadata at the item and collection level. The paper suggests elements of professional practice which can improve the functionality of landscapes, and presents an illustrative scenario of how a common information environment might be effective

Troping the Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, and the Big Data Black Boxes of National Security

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community\u27s (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of the opacity of these risks for analysts, even as such predictive cultural analytics are becoming a part of intelligence forecasting. This article examines the problem of information secrecy in two ways, by unpacking the opacity of “black box,” algorithm-based social science of culture for end users with little appreciation of their potential biases, and by evaluating the IC\u27s nontransparent approach to foreign cultures, as it underwrites national security assessments

Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA)

HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) employs the latest digital technology to develop an innovative methodology to the study of spatial data in Herodotus' Histories. Using a digital text of Herodotus, freely available from the Perseus on-line library, to capture all the place-names mentioned in the narrative, we construct a database to house that information and represent it in a series of mapping applications, such as GIS, GoogleEarth and GoogleMap Timeline. As a collaboration of academics from the disciplines of Classics, Geography, and Archaeological Computing, HESTIA has the twin aim of investigating the ways geography is represented in the Histories and of bringing Herodotus' world into people's homes

Metaphor, Objects, and Commodities

This article is a contribution to a symposium that focuses on the ideas of Margaret Jane Radin as a point of departure, and particularly on her analyses of propertization and commodification. While Radin focuses on the harms associated with commodification of the person, relying on Hegel's idea of alienation, we argue that objectification, and in particular objectification of various features of the digital environment, may have important system benefits. We present an extended critique of Radin's analysis, basing the critique in part on Gadamer's argument that meaning and application are interrelated and that meaning changes with application. Central to this interplay is the speculative form of analysis that seeks to fix meaning, contrasted with metaphorical thought that seeks to undermine some fixed meanings and create new meanings through interpretation. The result is that speculative and metaphorical forms are conjoined in an interactive process through which new adaptations emerge. Taking this critique an additional step, we use examples from contemporary intellectual property law discourse to demonstrate how an interactive approach, grounded in metaphor, can yield important insights