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America is like Metamucil: fostering critical and creative thinking about metaphor in political blogs

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Blogs are becoming an increasingly important medium -- socially, academically, and politically. Much research has involved analyzing blogs, but less work has considered how such analytic techniques might be incorporated into tools for blog readers. A new tool, metaViz, analyzes political blogs for potential conceptual metaphors and presents them to blog readers. This paper presents a study exploring the types of critical and creative thinking fostered by metaViz as evidenced by user comments and discussion on the system. These results indicate the effectiveness of various system features at fostering critical thinking and creativity, specifically in terms of deep, structural reasoning about metaphors and creatively extending existing metaphors. Furthermore, the results carry broader implications beyond blogs and politics about exploring alternate configurations between computation and human thought.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2010
      2690 pages
      ISBN:9781605589299
      DOI:10.1145/1753326
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      Published: 10 April 2010

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      1. blog readers
      2. computational metaphor identification
      3. creativity
      4. critical thinking
      5. metaphor
      6. political blogs

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      • (2021)A new SOCMINT framework for Threat Intelligence Identification2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00180(692-697)Online publication date: Dec-2021
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