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Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language
Edited by Marianna Bolognesi, Mario Brdar and Kristina Š. Despot
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 8] 2019
► pp. 99–122

Chapter 4
VisMet and the crowd

What social tagging reveals about visual metaphors

| University of Oxford
| VU University Amsterdam
| VU University Amsterdam

This chapter describes the data collection and analysis related to a new digital resource soon to be added to the VisMet 1.0 corpus of visual metaphor ([URL], Bolognesi, van den Heerik, van den Berg, 2018), consisting of crowdsourced tags. Tags are keywords used by online coders, non-expert of metaphors, to annotate and describe the images to which they were exposed, for different amounts of seconds.

The semantic information retrieved through this Social tagging experiment allows us to explore the type of information that users extract from visual metaphors, in a setting that better resembles the natural environment in which these images are usually experienced (i.e., for very limited amounts of seconds). We hereby provide methodological guidelines on this innovative procedure and report the results of our data collection and content analysis in which we manually classified the type of semantic information encoded in the tags.

Keywords: visual metaphor, social tagging, crowdsourcing task, metaphor processing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Tags as traces of human behavior
    • 2.2Visual metaphor comprehension and interpretation
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Crowdsourcing tags
    • 3.2Classifying tags
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Crowdsourcing tags
    • 4.2Classifying tags
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.8.05bol
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