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The Mind Is a Metaphor: About the Database

, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century.

When I left Stanford in 2006 for the University of Southern California, I met a USC undergraduate named Casey Stark--a whiz and a credit to research assistants everywhere!--who freed the metaphors from their original Filemaker format and helped me build a new relational database in MySQL. My method for finding metaphors may be classified as "hunt-and-peck," but a few years ago I collaborated with D. Sculley, formerly of Tufts University's Department of Computer Science and now at Google Pittsburgh, on a search protocol informed by machine-learning techniques. I search one term from a set list ("mind," "heart," "soul," "thought," "idea," "imagination," "fancy," "reason," "passion," "head," "breast," "bosom," or "brain") against another word that I hope will prove metaphorical.

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