Alien Phenomenology and metaphorism

by Darius Kazemi on May 10, 2012

in philosophy

I wanted to write up an essay in response to the third chapter of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, “Metaphorism.” Instead, I decided to do philosophical carpentry. I made this:

Metaphor-a-Minute!

It uses the Wordnik API to grab nouns and adjectives and does some very naive processing to form a basic metaphor. (It’s not polished; for some reason when I ask Wordnik for an adjective it only gives me one 90% of the time.)

Essentially, I’m skeptical that we can ever have good metaphors for anything; or rather, anything can be a good or a bad metaphor. I think metaphorism requires someone to take the stance of a poet, to have confidence in metaphor. And a poet I am not…

I would say more, but I think the work speaks for itself. Take heed, Ian–this object has spoken!

a speculation is a wicket: long-chain and soft-hearted

— Metaphor-a-Minute! (@metaphorminute) May 10, 2012

{ 4 comments }

Brooks May 28, 2012 at 1:51 pm

Hi Darius! I was using the metaphor a minute tweets as poetic inspiration, but it looks like the site has been suspended. (Naughty, naughty…)

Any chance you saved some of these tweets or have them archived?

Darius Kazemi May 29, 2012 at 7:40 am

I’m glad to hear you’ve been inspired by @metaphorminute! I’m currently in talks with Twitter support, trying to get the bot un-suspended. But no, there are no backup tweets :(

If it gets re-enabled what I’m going to do is write each tweet to a text file. And if Twitter won’t allow the bot, I will probably transform it into a metaphor generator website. Not quite the same thing as metaphor-a-minute, but at least it will live on in some form…

john May 9, 2014 at 8:43 am

Hi

I’ve seen you know how to build a Twitter bot to harvest metaphors.

Could you do me one to harvest one word “hun”

Thanks in advance.

John

Darius Kazemi May 11, 2014 at 8:27 pm

Sorry I can’t help with that…

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