Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What is computational cultural psychology?
- 2 The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology
- 3 Why don’t primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought
- 4 Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding “otherness”
- 5 Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence
- 6 Scent of a woman: the mediation of smell and automatic analysis of extended senses
- 7 Dolly Parton’s love lexicon: detection of motifs in cultural texts
- 8 The relational matrix of the I
- 9 Identifying themes: from the Wingfield family to Harry and Sally
- 10 Eating and dining: studying the dynamics of dinner
- 11 Getting even: the cultural psychology of revenge and what computers can do about it
- Epilogue: on generals and mail coach drivers
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
5 - Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What is computational cultural psychology?
- 2 The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology
- 3 Why don’t primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought
- 4 Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding “otherness”
- 5 Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence
- 6 Scent of a woman: the mediation of smell and automatic analysis of extended senses
- 7 Dolly Parton’s love lexicon: detection of motifs in cultural texts
- 8 The relational matrix of the I
- 9 Identifying themes: from the Wingfield family to Harry and Sally
- 10 Eating and dining: studying the dynamics of dinner
- 11 Getting even: the cultural psychology of revenge and what computers can do about it
- Epilogue: on generals and mail coach drivers
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
In May 2011, Wired magazine published a paper under the provocative title “Spies, meet Shakespeare: intel geeks build metaphor motherlode.” This title generates curiosity, as spies and Shakespeare belong to two different “semantic fields.” Although some notable writers, particularly British writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, belonged to the intelligence community, Shakespeare was probably not one of them.
The author of the article, Lena Groeger (2011), introduces the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – “the mad science unit of the intelligence community” – and its metaphor project, which aims to “exploit the use of metaphors by different cultures to gain insight into their cultural norms.”
In fact this project has drawn wide attention; The Economist joined the celebration by publishing the article “Metaphors we do everything by?” (R.L.G. 2011), and other newspapers have published similar stories.
IARPA is a relatively new American agency that was established to develop “the next generation of spycrat technologies” (Bhattacharjee 2009).
In the context of “spycraft,” metaphor identii cation isn’t the most salient tool. Our images of the spy world are nurtured by Hollywood rather than by the real world. We can imagine agent 007 – James Bond – driving a car that turns into a war machine. We can imagine the tech geeks who operate the most sophisticated technology to locate the place where Jason Bourne, the hero of The Bourne Identity, is calling from. However, we would hardly imagine a spy movie in which a secret agent bursts into the technology geeks’ oi ce shouting, “Urgent! I need the metaphors used by the Iranians to describe the United States.”
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- Introduction to Computational Cultural Psychology , pp. 78 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014