Abstract
Metaphors convey information, communicate abstractions, and help us understand new concepts. While the nascent field of information behavior (IB) has adopted common metaphors like “berry-picking” and “gap-bridging” for its models, the study of how people use metaphors is only now emerging in the subfield of human information organizing behavior (HIOB). Metaphors have been adopted in human–computer interaction (HCI) to facilitate the dialogue between user and system. Exploration of the literature on metaphors in the fields of linguistics and cognitive science as well as an examination of the history of use of metaphors in HCI as a case study of metaphor usage offers insight into the role of metaphor in human information behavior.
 Editor’s note: This article is the winner of the LITA/Ex Libris Writing Award, 2008.
Highlights
Metaphors convey information, communicate abstractions, and help us understand new concepts
Regarded as rhetorical devices, Plato abhorred the use of metaphors, arguing that they could convince a man to do the illogical
If “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another,” the vehicle or the source domain is responsible for elucidating the tenor or target domain.[3]
Summary
Communicate abstractions, and help us understand new concepts. Gentner’s work studying science metaphors in the 1980s is partially founded on this theory She notes that through “analogical reasoning, learning can result in the generation of new categories and schemas.”[14] She is interested in creating ways for computers to interpret figurative expressions. She proposes a structuremapping theory: a system of relations (not just traits) from the source domain to the target domain with a parallelism between the structures that allows for a one-to-one mapping of the domains and relationships. They conclude that metaphor instantiation might help us create systems that more closely resemble the way that humans behave with information: interaction, organization, and retrieval
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