Why it's worth it to participate -
Brainstorming metaphors exercises the dendritic nerves in the brain associated with insight. These are the brain cells responsible when ideas come "out of nowhere," and all at once. Practice with metaphors helps to connect areas of thinking, increasing the likelihood that ideas will coalesce.
Why Metaphors Matter -
Metaphors affect how people think. A study by D. Getner and D.R. Getner provided an example of differences in understanding that can result from the use of different metaphors for the same topic. "Their research showed that two different analogies for electricity can lead to differences in the way people understand and reason about electrodynamics. An electric current can be metaphorically compared to a flowing liquid, such as a river, or to a moving crowd of objects, such as cars on a highway. In a task requiring participants to reason about the consequences of how batteries and resistors were arranged in an electronic circuit, participants' performance was found to be dependent on which metaphor for electricity was used." (Allbritton qutd Getner 1983)
Project Metaphor Bios
SITES AND LINKS related to Project Metaphor (PM):
University of Hamburg Metaphor Database
This site uses corpus extracted
metaphors (mainly from newspapers) and files them into the abstract metaphor
categories designed by George Lakoff, known as the Berkeley Master List of Metaphors.
PM, by contrast, does not use the Berkeley list. These abstract metaphor
categories are extremely useful for cognitive psychologists; they show what BASIC
metaphors the human mind tends towards (such as: life is a Journey, time is distance,
intelligence is light etc), but ultimately, for the practical
brainstorming of metaphor, we believe each word/concept should be its
own hinge.
ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus
Visually, this is the closest site to pm that exists.
PM is very similar to a thesaurus, but allows and encourages metaphoric
leaps rather than just synonyms.
Cloud Tag
Cloud Tag is a feature on PM. Metaphors and connotations that are
added more frequently grow in text size and visibility.
Open Mind Project
MIT's ConceptNet ("a reasoning toolkit for commonsense software")
is built on information gathered from the public at the Open Mind site. ConceptNet is a
semantic web that relates concepts by way of relational lines such as:
IsA_(see inherited hypernyms)
CapableOf_('dentist''pull tooth')
FirstSubeventOf_
IsPrerequisiteOf_
LastSubeventOf_
LocationOf_
EffectOf_
DesirousEffectOf_
UsedFor_
MotivatedbyGoal_
CapableOfReceivingAction_('drink''serve')
MotivationOf_('play game''compete')
DesireOf_('person''not be depressed')
(and more)
Global Wordnet Association
"Begun in 1985 at Princeton University,
WordNet is arguably the most popular and widely used semantic
resource in the computational linguistics community today.
It is a database of words, primarily nouns, verbs and adjectives, organised
into discrete 'senses,' and linked by a small set of semantic relations such
as the synonym relation and 'is-a' hierarchical relations."
It is a language taxonomy project that organizes more than
200,000 thousand terms from abstract to specific.
FrameNet
A semantic web like ConceptNet and WordNet, FrameNet was
established at UC Berkeley to "frame" concepts, thus
reducing their dimensionality and making them more accessible to computers.
These frames that surround concepts can be important in calculating metaphor.
According to a Ph.D dissertation by Karen Sullivan, "Similarities in frame
structure lead to similarities in Metaphoric use. The consistency between frames and
mappings supports the idea that semantic frames shape items'
metaphoric uses." For an easy example, the Knowing Domain
and the Seeing Domain are evidently similar, which makes them
suitable for metaphoric overlap.
metaphors (mainly from newspapers) and files them into the abstract metaphor
categories designed by George Lakoff, known as the Berkeley Master List of Metaphors.
PM, by contrast, does not use the Berkeley list. These abstract metaphor
categories are extremely useful for cognitive psychologists; they show what BASIC
metaphors the human mind tends towards (such as: life is a Journey, time is distance,
intelligence is light etc), but ultimately, for the practical
brainstorming of metaphor, we believe each word/concept should be its
own hinge.
ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus Visually, this is the closest site to pm that exists.
PM is very similar to a thesaurus, but allows and encourages metaphoric
leaps rather than just synonyms.
Cloud Tag Cloud Tag is a feature on PM. Metaphors and connotations that are
added more frequently grow in text size and visibility.
Open Mind Project MIT's ConceptNet ("a reasoning toolkit for commonsense software")
is built on information gathered from the public at the Open Mind site. ConceptNet is a
semantic web that relates concepts by way of relational lines such as:
IsA_(see inherited hypernyms)
CapableOf_('dentist''pull tooth')
FirstSubeventOf_
IsPrerequisiteOf_
LastSubeventOf_
LocationOf_
EffectOf_
DesirousEffectOf_
UsedFor_
MotivatedbyGoal_
CapableOfReceivingAction_('drink''serve')
MotivationOf_('play game''compete')
DesireOf_('person''not be depressed')
(and more)
Global Wordnet Association "Begun in 1985 at Princeton University,
WordNet is arguably the most popular and widely used semantic
resource in the computational linguistics community today.
It is a database of words, primarily nouns, verbs and adjectives, organised
into discrete 'senses,' and linked by a small set of semantic relations such
as the synonym relation and 'is-a' hierarchical relations."
It is a language taxonomy project that organizes more than
200,000 thousand terms from abstract to specific.
FrameNet A semantic web like ConceptNet and WordNet, FrameNet was
established at UC Berkeley to "frame" concepts, thus
reducing their dimensionality and making them more accessible to computers.
These frames that surround concepts can be important in calculating metaphor.
According to a Ph.D dissertation by Karen Sullivan, "Similarities in frame
structure lead to similarities in Metaphoric use. The consistency between frames and
mappings supports the idea that semantic frames shape items'
metaphoric uses." For an easy example, the Knowing Domain
and the Seeing Domain are evidently similar, which makes them
suitable for metaphoric overlap.
Natural Language Processing
http://www.proxem.com/WhatisNLP/tabid/59/Default.aspxhttp://www.semanticiti.com/investors.htm