Mapping and countermapping shifting borders

Ayelet Shachar's The Shifting Border deploys a powerful map metaphor to support rethinking of borders and their functions. I interrogate this metaphor, developing some of the representational, constructive, and normative functions of maps, along with their connections to legal mechanisms for decoupling migration from territory. I survey three responses to the extra-territorialization of migration: a cynical response that rejects the possibility of migration justice, an abolitionist response connected to open borders, and a revisionist response that advocates for widescale institutional reform. The revisionist response illuminates how Shachar's essay challenges us to reflect on what sorts of maps and accompanying social and political organizations would best support migrant justice.

Map- or list-based recommender agents? Does the map metaphor fulfill its promise?

We present a spatialization of digital library content based on item similarity and an experiment which compares the performance of this spatialization relative to a simple list-based display. Items in the library are elementary school, middle school, and high school science and engineering learning resources. Spatialization and visualization are accomplished through two-dimensional interactive Sammon mapping of pairwise item similarities computed from the joint occurrence of word bigrams. The 65 science teachers participating in the experiment were asked to search the library for curricular items they would consider using as part of one or more teaching assignments. The results indicate that whereas the spatializations adequately capture the salient features of the library’s content and teachers actively use them, item retrieval rates, task-completion time, and perceived utility do not significantly differ from the semantically poorer but easier to comprehend and navigate list-based representations. These results put into question the usefulness of the rapidly increasing supply of information spatializations.

LINKING METAPHORS AND ARGUMENTS TO SEMANTIC PROSODIES: A CASE STUDY OF VICTORY VERBS IN INDONESIAN ONLINE FOOTBALL NEWS

The use of hyperbolic victory verbs such as menghancurkan to destroy, menekuk to fold, menggunduli to shave bald characterizes football news report in Indonesia. These verbs are used in the specific domain; therefore, suggesting that they need further examination. The objectives of this research are 1) to map metaphor classes and the arguments of these verbs and 2) to confirm whether the metaphor classes and the arguments are determinant to the semantic prosody of these verbs. Texts under football domainthat contain victory verbs were collected from different online news portals. The examination of victory verbs resulted on 10 affix formations and 10 different metaphor classes. Of these victory verbs, the frequent semantic roles are (the victors), (the defeated teams) and (the victories). The identification of the semantic prosody has shown that affix formation is fairly distributed and not significantly correlate to prosody. However, there is a strong tendency that metaphor class with negative nuance (like +DESTRUCTION, +WAR, +FIGHT) and the presence of an argument that takes semantic role suggests negative semantic prosody. They might be major cues to prosody in this data, but reexamination on a terminal level is still required to formalize this description, as some exceptions and irregularities are also present.

Communicating evolution with a Dynamic Evolutionary Map

Metaphors and visualizations are important for science communication, though they may have limitations. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a novel interactive visualization, the "Dynamic Evolutionary Map"' (DEM), which communicates biological evolution using a non-standard metaphor. The DEM uses a map metaphor and interactivity to address conceptual limitations of traditional tree-based evolutionary representations. In a pilot evaluation biology novices used the DEM to answer questions about evolution. The results suggest that this visualization communicates some conceptual affordances differently than trees. Therefore, the described approach of building alternative visual metaphors for challenging concepts appears useful for science communication.