The Language of Emotion
From dandi08
Contents |
[edit] Project Proposal
[edit] Members
[edit] Part I
Our project is centered on discovery. We want to learn what words and structures people use when telling emotionally charged stories of loss and finding. Do they tend to rely heavily on metaphor? Do they rely heavily on simile? If so, which metaphors and simile are used most often and in what ways? Are similar similes (say that five times fast) and metaphors used to express different emotions? Are there certain clichés, idioms, and words they rely on to convey meaning? Is there a specific structure used to tell the story itself? Do the structures change based on the emotion being conveyed? What syntactic structures do people use when telling their stories?
We want to know what the language of emotion shows about our way of categorizing emotion and specifically the emotions brought on by loss and discovery. Will our discoveries match-up with a more objectivist or experientialist view of categorization?
For a practical real world issue, we noticed that putting .txt files into the NLTK corpus is rather challenging. We will develop a Python program that will enable a user to do this in a more time efficient way.
[edit] Part II
We all read through Lakoff’s book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Our project is essentially further study into themes mentioned in the book. How do we actually categorize? Specifically, how do we categorize emotion?
We intend to look at semantics and syntactic structure to give us clues about categorization. So, we’ll use the tools we discovered in Fromkin’s An Introduction to Language. We’ll also use the NLTK methodologies to examine the created corpus.
Finally, we’ll use the techniques from Python programming to create a program that will allow us to transfer .txt into a NLTK corpus. We might need to rely on programming skill beyond that which we’ve learned.
[edit] Part III
First, we will develop a website we will develop a website. The site will consist of eight pages. The opening page, six blog pages, and an about us page telling the bloggers about our project. The page will have built-in anti-spam software and will be user-friendly. At the same time, we’ll develop posters to hang-up around campus and an overall look for our site and project. The design will include words and some touches of art. As part of this process we’ll choose the exact blog topics to go on the signs and six blog pages. Then, we'll hang signs up on campus that say things like "Lost: Friendship" or "Found: A Reason to Live". On the bottom of the sign there will be a link to our website and an invitation for the reader to tell their story. People will go to the site and read about our project. Then, they will write anonymous blogs on the topics mentioned in the posters. So, if they respond to "Lost: Friendship", then they'll blog about a lost friendship. We also intend to put posters around downtown Olympia, ads on Craigslist, promote the site on Myspace and Facebook promotions, and possibly get the word out with a table in the CAB building. We’ll then develop a Python program to transfer the .txt documents into a NLTK corpus. We’ll have to first translate the blogs into .txt files, but that is a fairly simple process. Once we have approximately ten blog responses for each lost/found poster in our corpus, we’ll go through the blogs and use dispersion graphs, concordance commands, and other NLTK tools to develop some theories and ideas about the language we use when writing about our emotions. We'll also go through the blogs to find semantic and syntactic structures, metaphors, words, similes, idioms, and clichés. Then we will analyze the results. We’ll organize our analyzed results in words, charts, and graphs. The final product will look something like Lakoff’s case study on anger mixed with Hovy’s paper on judgment opinions. We’ll probably include some photos and text samples to add a little pizzazz. Finally, we’ll produce a website, the posters, and the Python program.
[edit] Part IV
The Python lectures, labs, and book will help as we develop the Python program. We’ll rely on for loops, if statements and other Python programming code, all of which we learned in classes and reading. We might need to do further reading to fully develop the program, as well.
The many things we’ve learned in our studies with NLTK and linguistics will help when we begin to sift through the blogs. Our experience with dispersion graphs, WordNet, and other commands in NLTK will help us look at the semantics of the blogs. Our study in linguistics will help us discover the syntactic aspects of our project and will also help when recording the semantic aspects. We’ll continue to explore WordNet and delve deeper into NLTK to pull out other tools.
Finally, our reading and writing that centered on Lakoff will help us develop some of our end products. It has helped us define our theoretical issues, and we would also say that the book is part of what sparked our curiosity and led us to this project in the first place.
