My original goal was to come up with a clear question regarding metaphors and their usage by people online in different contexts (i.e. from social media to mathematics) and I spent a lot of time researching this but came to realize that…metaphor detection is hard.  So, while I did stumble on various hand curated databased of metaphors, there were no automated methods to detect these (which makes sense), and my research led me to papers discussing possible techniques etc. But I’m still attached to the idea and hopeful that I can find other data that is related to metaphor and using language to connect unlikely concepts together. I found a paper that described and listed general categories of “source” and “target” domains for metaphors. This, I think, could be useful if I can find an api that gives me instances of these general categories. Then given this information, in conjunction with the already curated metaphor databases I could have a good base of information to work with.

Possible visualizations that I would like to explore are graphs (networks) of concepts. These would be collapsible (clusters of similar concepts which are “instances of larger categories” could maybe be collapsed into that larger category). Another, maybe more interesting/interactive option that also takes into account not just the structure(concept relations) in metaphors but the social context and usage, is to have two columns (one for source and one for target) that the user could choose from each and connect, then the system would search for metaphors that connect these and instances of these occurring in conversations online.

Here is a link to the full data: https://github.com/spopat/metaphor-network/blob/master/metaphors.json

And here is a sample:

{
  "views": {
    "view": [
      {
        "name": "Body Is A Container",
        "source_domain": "Container",
        "target_domain": "Body",
        "origin": "mml",
        "timestamp": "2002-07-25T15:53:49"
      },
      {
        "name": "Emotions Are Entities Within A Person",
        "source_domain": "Entities",
        "target_domain": "Emotions",
        "parent": "Body Is A Container",
        "examples": { "example": "I was filled with rage" },
        "origin": "mml",
        "timestamp": "2002-07-25T15:56:14"
      },
      {
        "name": "Abilities Are Entities Inside A Person",
        "source_domain": "Entities",
        "target_domain": "Abilities",
        "parent": "Body Is A Container",
        "examples": { "example": "he doesn't have it in him to be polite" },
        "origin": "mml",
        "timestamp": "2002-07-25T15:57:50"
      }