Let’s Play: Piggydb Knowledge Creation #4 – “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

It’s been a while since the last installment. It is partially because this time I took up a book with structure-rich content: an academic essay.

“Metaphors We Live By” is the book I selected this time. It is one of the cornerstone books of cognitive linguistics, dealing with conceptual metaphor, which, according to this book, plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

I’m not a specialist in this field at all and haven’t studied it before. So it was a time-consuming task for me to digest the content and somehow restructure it on Piggydb.

As a result, it produced far more knowledge fragments and a complex structure than before. And it’s also the most abstract topic in this series because it deals with the cause of our intelligence.

– http://piggydb.jp/example/fragment.htm?id=60
– http://piggydb.jp/example/d/60 (Document View)

As the number of the fragments grew, I felt it was important to try to make a title for each fragment. It’s good for both to grasp your knowledge-base later and understand what you have quoted from a book. A shorter title would be better, and if a title becomes a noun, you should consider to put the fragment in a higher place. A key to comprehend a complex idea is to rearrange the content in a concept(noun)-oriented way. If you look into the example in the above links, you’ll see most of the top level fragments have a noun as their title.

In the course of dealing with such a complex content, I felt Piggydb should become more expressive. The book contains many new ideas found after it was first published and updates of the old ideas explained in the original content. To express these subtle relationships, I think it needs to improve in terms of fragment’s relationships.