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1. Introduction
Metaphors are ubiquitous means by which people structure thought. They have an important function as mind settings, which influence our cognition of the self and the world (Moser, 2000). Building on a tradition of research into verbal metaphors, since the 1990s there has been growing interest in visual or pictorial metaphors. A number of studies have explored visual metaphors in diverse genres, such as advertising (Forceville, 1996), films (Carroll, 1996), and cartoons (Morris, 1993).
In the work at hand, arts-informed, visual research, and the draw-and-write technique were combined with metaphor analysis to provide a new perspective on the concept of information. The study is based upon an exercise in which graduate students express information as a drawing, and explores the pictorial metaphors that appeared in such drawings. The project contributes to the conceptions of information already in the literature; demonstrates a novel interdisciplinary methodology and research design; and has benefits for information science education and professional practice.
Metaphors link two conceptual domains, the source domain and the target domain. By means of an expression taken from a concrete area (the source domain), something located in the target domain may be made more understandable. The target domain is abstract, unknown, and difficult to envisage, as far as its meaning is concerned (Lakoff, 1987, pp. 276-278). To fully understand abstract things, it helps to refer to concrete, physical, or tangible things. For example, in the metaphorical expression “Love is a journey,” everyday knowledge about journeys (the source domain) is mapped onto knowledge about love (the target domain). By means of such correspondences, we may come to understand love through our knowledge of journeys. In this example, metaphor is a linguistic device, but the same correspondence strategy can be used in the visual realm.
More than 2,000 original drawings of information have been collected in the iSquare research program (www.iSquares.info). The majority of the images take the form of literal representations of information, namely depictions of documents, technology, and/or people (Hartel, 2014a). The authors of this paper noticed that alongside many literal renderings were pictorial metaphors, in which information was expressed as a tree, light bulb, or city, among other easily recognizable source domains. A literature review confirmed that the pictorial metaphors for information had yet...