it does a body good (?)

here's a quote from someone commenting on somewhat spurious results in metaViz, specifically, the metaphor that "America is like milk":

I disagree; I do not think that America is very much like milk at all. Milk is thick, smooth, and sweet, while America is rather...gritty. America is like Metamucil.

some of the replies are just as good.

Yet America very rarely gives you your daily recommended fiber, so, perhaps America is just muddy water?

America is like milk in the sense that new immigrants tend to get homogenized.

absolutely fabulous, I couldn't have asked for a better alternative metaphor.

why I enjoy working with children

as part of a unit on cell biology, students were asked to come up with metaphors for understanding a cell. they learned about a cell with the metaphor a Cell is a City (the nucleus is city hall, the mitochondria are powerplants, etc.), and then they were asked to come up with their own new metaphor, something else that a cell is like. most said things like a school, a car, a restaurant, or a house. however, one student said that "a cell is like the sky." when asked why, s/he replied

The sky has many moving clouds in it's vast blue sea. The clouds could remind me of the organelles in a cell. If you use your imagination, you can see them interacting with each other.

not only is this a rather unique metaphor, but it gives the cell a grandeur, beauty, and grace not commonly found in science learning.

a new metaphor on election day

how long did you stand in line to vote? I spent about an hour and forty-five minutes at my local polling place this morning. and based on what I hear from other parts of the country, that wasn't even that bad.

while you're hanging around waiting for the results to be counted (which is probably starting about now on the east coast), here's an interesting metaphor that metaViz turned up recently: a candidate is like a theory. I think it provides a great alternative to the common adversarial rhetoric surrounding political campaigns (even the word "campaign" is reminiscent of war). click through for a full description and a link to the visualization.

metaphors in political speeches

as I mentioned previously, I've been spending a lot of time recently working on metaViz, a computational system designed to identify conceptual metaphors in political blogs. metaViz also includes analysis of the campaign speeches from McCain and Obama (presidential candidates from the two major political parties). there's a UCI press release that gives an example interpretation of some of the results. I think the major value of the press release is that it shows how the system is meant to be used and how one might go about interpreting the metaphors that it identifies. check it out, and let me know what you think.

metaViz (i.e, what I've been up to lately)

I'll admit, I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to this summer. most of my time has been spent developing metaViz, an application designed to allow blog readers to see potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs. here's a blurb about the project:

metaViz is a system that finds conceptual metaphors in political blogs, displays the metaphors in an interactive visual fashion, and lets you look at the different ways in which many concepts are framed in those blogs. For example, a 'campaign' is often talked about like a 'war' -- both are 'fought,' 'won,' 'lost,' 'survived,' etc. The goal is to foster critical thinking, getting people to think about what's being said not just by the words themselves, but between and behind the words.

if you have a chance, check it out, and feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested. if you have any thoughts about the project, drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you.

link to a demo

I've been a little taciturn of late with respect to blogging, not so much for lack of ideas, but for lack of time. to hear a bit about on what I've been working that's taken so much of my time, check out this post about a demo we did today.

I may very well be blogging over at Calit2.Life pretty soon, in which case I'll cross-link from here.

patriotism and matriotism

about a week ago, John Holbo from Crooked Timber posted in reaction to a discussion of what constitutes patriotism. there are some really interesting questions raised, including (but not limited to): can patriotism condone or include a critical stance towards one's country? do liberals and conservatives have different versions of patriotism? does patriotism mean thinking your country is objectively the best, or is it more akin to familial love or loyalty to a sports team? is patriotism an import quality for all citizens to have, or is it essentially a military virtue? if an individual is patriotic, must s/he love everything about her/his country, or is s/he allowed to love only some aspects thereof and wish to remake others? near the end of the post, the blogger quotes Carl Schurz: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." I think that does an excellent job of summing up what patriotism is (or perhaps should be) about, and I highly recommend reading the posted linked above, as it's got some great thoughts on the topic.

however, what I want to discuss here is not patriotism per se, but the language we use to think about (and by implication the concepts we use to think about) patriotism. at one point in the post, Jonah Goldberg is said to have quoted Ramesh Ponnuru as saying, "can't love of my country be like love of my mother?" Holbo says this conception, rather than patriotism as thinking your country is objectively the best, is pretty much spot-on the way to approach the issue.

If you love America because it is objectively the best at doing certain things that’s fine but not patriotism. That’s like loving your football team only so long as its winning, which is sort of the opposite of team loyalty. As I was saying: who thinks that loving your mother means loving everything about her to the point of being opposed to your mom improving herself or getting her act together or overcoming her problems? If your mom has problems – maybe really serious problems – and your brothers or sisters are trying to help, do you stand athwart the train of helping mom crying ‘stop!’ On the grounds that you love her too much to bear to see her become better, hence un-mom-like?

what's interesting here, to me, is the use of "mother" as the image for country. not least is this striking because of Lakoff's discussion of the "strict father" vs "nurturant parent" metaphors for conservative and progressive politics, respectively. what's interesting is why patriotism is not described as loving your country like you love your father. the etymology of patriotism and patriot come from the Latin and Greek meaning, roughly, "of the same father." given this etymology, and given Lakoff's assertions about conservative philosophy framing government as a strict father, why does Ponnuru describing loving one's country like loving one's mother rather than like loving one's father? I have a few guesses.

first, I think it's partly because it's because Ponnuru (and Goldberg, for that matter) are male. for a man, loving your mother is expected. loving your father is perfectly reasonable, as well, but it's a different sort of love. it's the love that is at most times gruff and distances, and it only comes through in bear-hug embraces at special occasions like graduations, weddings, and perhaps some holidays. it's not the kind of interaction that's usually associated with love. with your mother, though, it's much more of a caring, comforting sort of love. I think, implicitly, Ponnuru, and through citation Goldberg, are here trying to set up a certain sort of framing of how they think about country and government, that it is not a somewhat distances, gruff interaction, but that citizen and country truly care for each other.

second, there are different perceptions about correcting mother vs correcting father. in the scenario one describes above, it's easy to envision gather with siblings to try to correct some of Mom's more self-destructive behaviors. but can we really envision correcting Dad? I don't think so, at least not as readily (I'm sure that those more familiar than I with feminist literature on authority in the family would have more informed things to say about this than I do). given the etymology of patriotism, I'm a little surprised at the idea of loving your country like you love your mother, but given the argument being made, it's not a surprising framing at all. if we're making the point that patriotism and desiring to change/correct your country are not mutually exclusive, it seems much more advantageous to frame country as mother than as father.

so who cares? does it really matter if we love our country like we love our mother or like we love our father? yes, it matters a great deal, partially by virtue of the fact that many people often tend to think that it doesn't matter all that much. using the metaphor that your country is like your mother has different entailments that your country is like your father. by using the language associated with maternal, rather than paternal, relationships, the speaker invokes (albeit somewhat subconsciously) a whole series of entailments and implications about interacting with one's country, based on interacting with one's mother. I think what's important here is not the specific metaphor being used, whether it's mother or father. what is important is recognizing that a metaphor is being invoked at all and questioning what that metaphor implies, what is doesn't imply, and what alternative metaphors might be used. how would patriotism be different if we thought about it instead being like loving your father? or your grandparent? or your uncle? what about being like your relationship with your coach? your boss? your therapist? how about a different metaphor entirely that doesn't anthropomorphize one's country and treat it as a sentient human being, but rather frames the country a complex entity whose actions arise from the combination of many individual actions? in this regard, the country as a sports team metaphor might be better, but there is another whole slew of entailments and implications concomitant with the sports team metaphor that are really beyond the scope of this (already somewhat longish) post.

suffice it to say, I think there needs to be some critical questioning of the ways in which we talk about and think about these central, key political concepts, such as patriotism.

evaluation, interpretability, and the utility of dreaming

a few nights ago, my girlfriend and I watched The Science of Sleep. for those not familiar, the basic premise revolves around a main character who has difficulty discerning between his waking life and his dreams. afterward, we got into (what I felt was) a somewhat confused conversation about whether or not it was a good movie, why it was a good movie, and how you know it's a good movie (and I fear that conversation has led indirectly to what is an almost equally confused blog post). one of the pseudo-conclusions to which we came is that it's a good movie because of its interpretability. that is, there are several parts of the movie, foremost the ending but also bits and pieces throughout, where it was, we think, left intentionally unclear what exactly happened. the point is not to figure out the "true" or "real" story at those points. rather, the genius of the movie seemed its ability to engage the audience in interpreting those somewhat ambiguous parts. my mind kept slipping towards questions of evaluation; how do we know it's a good movie? when the key aspect of the movie has nothing to do with the movie objectively and everything to do with the interactions between movie and viewer, how can one really say anything about the movie itself?

evaluation is a huge buzz word in HCI. "ok, cool, you built your system, but does it work? does it achieve the intended goal?" I've heard it described that part of a dissertation is scoping out a problem, picking a portion of that problem, describing the win condition wherein you know that the problem has been solved, and, crucially, demonstrating that the win condition has been achieved. even when we recognize that evaluation is an interactive process, that it's really about the meeting of system and user, evaluation so often boils down to a question of success. does the system achieve the goals it set out to accomplish? there are certainly lots of conversations going on right now about richer, fuller means of evaluation, focusing less on system evaluation and more on experience evaluation, and emphasizing that evaluation is a process of determining value, which is necessarily contextually (historically, culturally, etc.) contingent. personally, I find a lot of this work both particularly compelling and very liberating, especially with respect to the epistemological questions it raises; what do we as a field consider valid knowledge, and how do we validate methods of knowledge production? on the other hand (maybe it's just that I'm having a hard time shedding my positivist roots), I have a desire to know, does it work?

this desire becomes inherently problematic when the ostensible goal of a system is to support, facilitate, encourage, and even engender critical thinking and reflection, especially when that reflection hinges on the interpretability of the system. here, I refer to interpretability not as a question of "do participants interpret this system properly?" rather, the question I want to ask is, "to what extent does the system present a resource for interpretation?" it's difficult enough to ascertain whether or not interactors are engaging in these abstract process--critical thinking, reflection, interpretation--to begin with. now, try to determine to what extent the interactor's thoughts, feelings, behavior are a result of interacting with the system. the very notion seems misguided; we're not dealing with a system cause-and-effect relationship here, but rather a whole complex system in which I doubt any single aspect can be causally linked to any other. besides, this isn't about controlling for confounding factors. it's about getting people to think, to critically engage, and to question, reconsider, and possibly even reformulate their conceptual frame.

I think one of the difficulties in my case is that the system I'm developing has a goal that seems objectively evaluable. does it do what I say it does? am I able to automatically identify conceptual metaphors (a la Lakoff and Johnson) in bodies of written text? well, I think the question of whether or not it works, or how well it works, depends largely upon the interactor's (i.e., "user's") interpretation of the system's results. moreover, I think it hinges on the interpretability of those results. the question, I suspect, should not be, "does the system accurately and correctly identify conceptual metaphors?" rather, the question should be, "does the system produce results that serve as a resource for the interactor's interpretation, and through that interpretive process does the interactor engage in critical thinking and reflection?" not that this is a particularly easy question to answer, but it seems a somewhat more useful one in terms of evaluating, i.e., determining the value, of the system. it's not about measuring success, it's about understanding the interactors' experience with the system.

this ended up getting too long for a single post, so I'll end with the above thoughts about evaluating interpretability and reflection. more stuff about dreaming to follow...