Digitizing Metaphor

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a fascinating article about the use of computers to recognize and catalog metaphors. It leads with the story of Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, who created a website called The Mind is a Metaphor, which is a database of literary metaphors that writers used for the mind.

The Chronicle reporter writes:

Mr. Pasanek hopes it will help literary and intellectual historians gain insights into how people's language reflects their understanding of the world around them.

The article also notes a database of contemporary metaphors of the mind created by a British artificial intelligence researcher.

I'm intrigued people are collecting these metaphors and that they have developed computer algorithms that can recognize them.

Most intriguing though is the articles discussion of how the metaphors we used to characterize the mind have changed. In the 18th Century writers often compared the mind to a book or a page, whereas nowadays the mind is more often compared to a computer.

The most interesting question for me is how does the shift in the metaphors we use change how we think and act. If I think of my mind as a computer as opposed to a book, how am I different.

Someone asked me recently if I had the bandwidth to handle another task in my workload. I thought it was a great turn of phrase and I've been using myself. But I've also been wondering if it changes somehow the way I perceive myself as a human, professional, worker, cog in the machine.