A major problem for users of modern information systems is the retrieval of new and previously viewed information from the system. Systems like the Word-Wide Web are heavily interlinked but do not communicate structure that helps users to navigate the information it contains. The use of appropriate navigation metaphors can help to make the structure of modern information systems easier to under...

Visual analytics emphasizes sensemaking of large, complex datasets through interactively exploring visualizations generated by statistical models. For example, dimensionality reduction methods use various similarity metrics to visualize textual document collections in a spatial metaphor, where similarities between documents are approximately represented through their relative spatial distances ...

The computer metaphor for the mind or brain has long outlived its usefulness, being based on Cartesian ideas. Connectionism has not broken free from this metaphor, and this has stunted the directions connectionist research has taken. The subordinate role of timing in computations has resulted in networks with real-value timelags on signals passing between nodes being ignored. The notion of repr...

This article seeks first to understand recent methodological discussions in metaphor research in the context of biblical and theological studies. Metaphors are complex literary devices that require familiarity with the world view and historical context of the respective author of a particular ancient text and also communicate on an experiential level. The multiplicity and polyvalence of metapho...

Medicine can not only be read with a poetic imagination, but also configured as a poetic practice, moving beyond the instrumental. The poet Wallace Stevens made a distinction between ‘Force’ and ‘Presence’—the former can be read as combative, the latter as pacific. Modern medicine has been shaped historically by the combative metaphor of a ‘war against disease’, turning medicine into a quasi-mi...

We present the use of games as a metaphor for constructing and organising interactive systems, with particular attention to the provision of KnowledgeBased Front-Ends (KBFEs) to software packages. Interaction is viewed as a rule governed activity which may usefully be regarded as a game. Given a specification of the rules, implementation of an interactive system requires construction of an umpi...

Scientific theories are more than purely formal constructs, but linguistic artefacts that often rely on the rhetorical qualities of language to give their claims additional resonance and argumentative force. This reliance of theory upon language is even greater in those theoretical domains whose main concern is language itself, leading to a sometimes convenient blurring of content and form. Tho...

Metaphors have been shown to be effective explanatory and communicative tools, shaping how people think and reason about complex domains. To date, however, most studies have addressed only coarse-grained effects of metaphor framing, leaving many questions unanswered about the relative power of metaphor compared to more literal linguistic framing devices. We addressed this issue in a large, pre-...