metaViz: Visualizing Computationally Identified Metaphors in Political Blogs

This paper presents metaViz, an online application that uses computational metaphor identification to find conceptual metaphors in political blogs. The application presents those metaphors to users in an interactive, visual fashion, with the goal of fostering critical thinking and creativity. This paper describes the computational techniques and interface design of metaViz, and presents an evaluation of the tool based on a controlled experiment showing that metaViz is more effective at fostering critical thinking than blog reading alone. This research draws attention to the need for tools that facilitate blog reading while encouraging critical engagement with the text, helping to lay the groundwork for enabling new ways of reading and interacting with blogs.