CREATIME. The Spatial Cognition of Time: Creativity, Culture, Communication
Research Question
We tend to think of time in spatial terms (“Saturday is approaching”). How complex is this pattern and how creative can its use be across different contexts and modalities (speech, poetry, gesture, film)? What can this tell us about the human mind, especially about creativity and the imagination?
Project Description
Complex concepts, such as time, are often based on more structured ones, such as motion (“Saturday is approaching”). CREATIME proposes that this process is more complex, creative, and flexible than is currently thought. To gain insight into it, we need to go beyond the lab or the dictionary, and examine what people actually do in the rich communicative and cultural contexts we all live in. CREATIME compares big data from speech, gesture, poetry, and film. For this, we work with NewsScape, the Red Hen Lab’s Library of Television News (over 250,000 hours, 3 billion words). NewsScape provides thousands of clips in which the same linguistic expression is uttered across multiple situations. We also extract data from PoetiCog, our own multilingual dataset of poetic expressions.
Selected Publications
1) Pagán Cánovas, C. & Valenzuela J. Forthcoming. Timelines and multimodal constructions: Facing new challenges. Linguistic Vanguard.
2) Pagán Cánovas, C. & Piata, A. Forthcoming. The way time goes by: Conceptual integration and the poetics of time. To appear in S. Csábi (ed.) Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
3) Pagán Cánovas, C., Valenzuela, J. & Santiago, J. 2015. Like the machete the snake: Integration of topic and vehicle in poetry comprehension reveals meaning construction processes. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 9(4). 385-393.