Winter school 2013
29 participants of the 2012 summer and winter schools have come back to the Metaphor Lab School to participate in a follow-up event on ‘Metaphor Identification and Analysis’ in January 2013.
Read below a review by one of the participants, Stefanie Vogelbacher (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany)
“During last year’s Met Lab Winter School, Tina, Gerard and Alan introduced us to methods of metaphor identification in language, thought and gesture, in hands-on, practically oriented courses. At the same time, they offered us an overview of relevant topics, including new fields of metaphor research such as gesture analysis. Most of all, however, the three raised our awareness for the contemporary discussions in metaphor studies, and showed us how to avoid the pitfalls of conflating the dimensions of metaphor by being explicit and systematic in our analyses. With our eyes opened to new fields of research as well as to the controversial issues, and equipped with different tools, we went back to our own research.
Many of us came back, after one year of putting these tools into practice, this time to share our experiences. It was absolutely inspiring to see how productively MIPVU and five steps had been employed! Each day was organised and prepared in small focus groups which centred around our own research interests: Metaphor in Language, Thought, and Communication, Multimodal Metaphor and Metaphor across History and Culture. Thus covering a whole range of cutting-edge topics in metaphor research, we enjoyed a week fully packed with lively, thought-provoking and insightful discussions. Participants took the opportunity to present their work in progress, showing samples from their own data analysed with MIPVU or five steps, introducing new tools for annotating corpora and ideas for future research projects.
Valuable comments and feedback, both from the experts and other PhDs and postdocs from around the world, were given not only during the sessions, but also (as preferred by many) over a beer in one of Amsterdam’s pubs – often followed by further explorations into Amsterdam’s night life.
All in all, it was a really intense and inspiring week, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is into metaphor studies. The 2013 Winter School has really taken us to the next level!”