tachyphylaxis/The-Mind-Is-A-Metaphor

Dataset Card for "The Mind is a Metaphor"

The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century.

☞ The database was assembled and taxonomized and is maintained by Brad Pasanek."

NOTE: this is basically just a raw conversion. There are formatting tags in it, etc that should probably be removed. I'll do that at some point; if you want to, please, by all means, DO IT! ;-)

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

There are over 14,000 metaphors in the database as of April, 2015. I've hundreds more marked in books and scribbled on notecards, and I am typing those up -- slowly, surely. It's much easier to cut and paste.

My method for finding metaphors may be classified as "hunt-and-peck," but a few years ago I collaborated with D. Sculley, formerly of Tufts University's Department of Computer Science and now at Google Pittsburgh, on a search protocol informed by machine-learning techniques. We trained a computer to label metaphors and non-metaphors correctly. Our experiments suggest one might be able to automate much of my daily drudgery by using a classifier trained on a seed set of 100-200 labeled metaphors and non-metaphors. This hand-curated database of metaphors could then be put to work in bootstrapping efforts, repurposed as training data for automated classifiers sent forward and backward in history, departing from the eighteenth century in order to collect Renaissance and Victorian metaphors.

Should we eventually build an automated metaphor-classifier and charge it with exploring the great unread collections of electronic literature, I would be more confident in presenting a statistical picture of eighteenth-century discourse. In the meantime, two papers we've written on the subject have been published in Oxford's Literary and Linguistic Computing.

I still spend a fair amount of time conducting proximity searches for two character strings. I search one term from a set list ("mind," "heart," "soul," "thought," "idea," "imagination," "fancy," "reason," "passion," "head," "breast," "bosom," or "brain") against another word that I hope will prove metaphorical. For example, I search for "mind" within one hundred characters of "mint" and find the following couplet in William Cowper's poetry:

"The mind and conduct mutually imprint And stamp their image in each other's mint." What follows is a rough breakdown of the database's contents:

Provenance (last updated July, 2013) More than 5,980 of the metaphors were found keyword searching Chadwyck-Healey through the Stanford Humanities Digital Information Service SULAIR search interface. The search interface, named HUGO, has now been retired. Over 900 more metaphors were discovered searching Proquest's Literature Online collections (LION), which expanded and have now replaced the original Chadwyck-Healey collections 783 metaphors are from my Orals reading or date from my first six months of collection Over 3,000 I've encountered while reading since then More than 450 metaphors were discovered searching in Google Books 338 were found browsing in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) 218 were found keyword-searching texts in the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty (OLL) 188 were found keyword searching the Intelex Past Masters database 180 are from Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Oxford: OUP, 1989. 150 are from the King James Bible (UVA edition) 110 were found browsing in Early English Books Online (EEBO) Over 100 were found searching Project Gutenberg texts 67 were taken from Johnson's Dictionary 27 are from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 21 are from Ad Fontes Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts Some Rubrics (last updated April, 2015) 721 Animal metaphors (counted as entries) 986 Architecture metaphors 1,365 Body metaphors 440 Fetters metaphors* 509 Plant metaphors 1,827 Government metaphors* 882 Impression metaphors 738 Light metaphors 689 Liquid metaphors 273 Machine metaphors 1,015 Mineral metaphors* 444 Optics metaphors 1,055 Population metaphors 171 Vehicle metaphors 268 Visual Arts metaphors 667 War metaphors* 524 Weather metaphors 817 Writing metaphors* 2,744 Miscellaneous or "Uncategorized" entries I've done in-depth proximity searches for Fetters, Government, Mineral, War, and Writing metaphors. These categories are marked with an asterisk in the list above.

• Curated by: [Brad Pasanek]
• Language(s) (NLP): [English]
• License: [CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 DEED]

Dataset Sources [optional]

• Repository: [http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors]

Source Data

There are over 14,000 metaphors in the database as of April, 2015. I've hundreds more marked in books and scribbled on notecards, and I am typing those up -- slowly, surely. It's much easier to cut and paste.

Data Collection and Processing

[My method for finding metaphors may be classified as "hunt-and-peck," but a few years ago I collaborated with D. Sculley, formerly of Tufts University's Department of Computer Science and now at Google Pittsburgh, on a search protocol informed by machine-learning techniques. We trained a computer to label metaphors and non-metaphors correctly. Our experiments suggest one might be able to automate much of my daily drudgery by using a classifier trained on a seed set of 100-200 labeled metaphors and non-metaphors. This hand-curated database of metaphors could then be put to work in bootstrapping efforts, repurposed as training data for automated classifiers sent forward and backward in history, departing from the eighteenth century in order to collect Renaissance and Victorian metaphors.

Should we eventually build an automated metaphor-classifier and charge it with exploring the great unread collections of electronic literature, I would be more confident in presenting a statistical picture of eighteenth-century discourse. In the meantime, two papers we've written on the subject have been published in Oxford's Literary and Linguistic Computing.]

Who are the source data producers?

[Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia]

Glossary [optional]

[Literary Period. Although the preponderance of metaphors collected here originate in the long eighteenth century, I continue to add to the database and have plans to expand the collection of metaphors across neighboring periods, working my way forward to the twentieth century. Conventional periodizations for English literature, drawn loosely from the Norton Anthology of English Literature, are provided as follows:

Middle Ages (500-1500) Tudor Literature (1485-1603) Early Modern (1500-1800) Elizabethan (1558-1603) Seventeenth Century (1600-1700) Early Seventeenth Century (1603-1660) Civil War and Commonwealth (1641-1660) Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1819) Restoration (1660-1714) Augustan (1700-1745) Eighteenth Century (1700-1799) Age of Sensibility (1740-1798) Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) Romantic (1785-1832) French Revolution (1789-1815) Nineteenth Century (1800-1900) Reform and Counterrevolution (1815-1848) Victorian (1837-1901) Aestheticism and Decadence (1870-1901) Twentieth Century (1900-1999) Edwardian (1901-1914) Modernism (1910-1945) Interwar (1914-1939) Post-WWII (1945-1989) Metaphor Categories. Treated here is the long eighteenth century, a neoclassical period; that is, a period that would, by confronting the past, newly classify the world. My categories are meant to help map those constellations of metaphors for the mind that visitors to this site will find most interesting. My categories and subcategories are then a heuristic or a finding aid. They do not correlate with any rigid concept scheme. They are a product of inductive work, of clustering and classifying those metaphors I've collected. The categories are imposed upon the unruly figuration I've dredged up; they do not cut cleanly into the discourse nor could they. Note, a metaphor--the same metaphor--may belong to multiple categories.

Genre. Major generic divisions here observed include poetry, non-fiction prose, prose fiction, and drama.

The Gender of an author is given where known. Women writers are currently outnumbered almost six to one in the database. I'm not happy about that and have considered trying to better balance the authors. Still, Katherine Philips, Sarah Fielding, Anna Seward, and Anna Letitia Barbauld contribute many of my favorite metaphors.

Another thing, a disclaimer. The binary (in fact, ternary: Male/Female/Unknown) nature of these gender assignment must not go unremarked. Such distinctions are without nuance and ineluctably political. I recognize that this eighteenth-century project cannot help but reinscribe distinctions made modern by the history surveyed. But in borrowing Enlightenment forms (the dictionary, the commonplace book) and practices (taxonomy) in my scholarly writing, I try to make strange the present. And in organizing the past in database tables and entries, I want to, likewise, promote categorical confusion as thematic. A metaphor, by one description, is a "category mistake."

So. In the sometimes murky taxonomy applied in this interface, Anonymous is not a woman--even though She may have, in fact, written much of the Bible. (And I take it, for what it's worth, that Paul the Apostle authored the assertion "there is no male and female.") My labeling currently lists Jack Halberstam's author function as "Male," but I plan on resetting such assignments occasionally and as necessary in order to remind myself and others that an improvised metrics is required in the transitional present.

Nationality. The English literature of the period in which I am most interested bedevils the assignment of "nationality." The long eighteenth century in England is witness to two Acts of Union (1707, 1800) and a declaration of independence by the American colonies. I have tried to specify authors' nationalities according to their places of birth. There are then English, Scottish, and American authors listed here, but only a few "British" authors. My ancients are either "Greek" or "Chinese" or "Roman." Kant and other Prussian writers are labeled "German." I realize that "Irish or Anglo-Irish" is a particularly unsatisfactory national designation. And the category "African or Afro-British" is worse than unsatisfactory.

A second disclaimer then: here I let an early modern conception of race as nation mark important eighteenth-century writers (Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and others). Many of these writers brilliantly invoke and evade the category, with Olaudah Equiano being the most famous and most famously ambivalent example of an Afro-Anglo-American author. After 1800 I do not use the unfixed race/nation category: Frederick Douglass's metaphors are tallied as American; Frantz Fanon's, French. I emphasize here that my labels are not an attempt to foreclose the discussion of identity. Just the opposite.

Politics. An author is given a party label only when I find mention of his or her politics in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or an equally reputable biographical source. The label is applied to authors and not to works of literature, which necessitates the use of some cumbersome labels. (Daniel Defoe, for example, is notorious for changing political affiliations.) My labels were first generated for a set of clustering and classifying experiments undertaken with the computer scientist D. Sculley. These experiments tested connections between metaphorical usage and party affiliation and are the subject of an article on "Meaning and Mining" published in Literary and Linguistic Computing: link. As I am interested primarily in metaphor and eighteenth-century party politics, I have been most assiduous in labeling eighteenth-century authors.

Religion. An author's religious beliefs are likewise labeled when given in the ODNB. Converts from one religion to another are so labeled. Again, converts may collect multiple, conflicting labels. (Vide John Dryden.)]

More Information [optional]

[More Information Needed]

Dataset Card Authors [optional]

[Blair Sadewitz]

Dataset Card Contact

[blair.sadewitz@gmail.com]