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"Metaphor is recognised as an important way of thinking - constructing analogies and making connections between ideas - and an important way of using language to explain abstract ideas or to find indirect but powerful ways of conveying feelings. By investigating people's use of metaphors, we can better understand their emotions, attitudes and conceptualisations, as individuals and as participants in social life. This book describes practice in the analysis of metaphor in real-world discourse. When real-world language use is taken as the site of metaphor study, researchers face methodological issues that have only recently begun to be addressed. The contributors to this volume have all had to find ways to deal with methodological issues in their own research and have developed techniques that are brought together here. Using as a basis the discourse dynamics approach to metaphor developed by the editor, the book explores links between theory and empirical investigation, exemplifies data analysis and discusses issues in research design and practice. Particular attention is paid to the processes of metaphor identification, categorisation and labelling, and to the use of corpus linguistic and other computer-assisted methods."--Publisher's description

In 2006 CFI announced its financial support for the creation of a national High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, and the formation of a new organization to govern it: Compute Canada. The platform now affords Canadian researchers with more computational power than they have ever enjoyed before. HPC presents rich research possibilities for Canada's social scientists and humanities (SSH) researchers. Our respective research communities, however, are not yet prepared to exploit them. This report outlines two possibilities that HPC presents for SSH research, centering on serious computer games and Massive Multi-User Persistent Worlds. It also contains recommended steps for SSHRC and the SSH research community to take in order to exploit them.

In the 21st century, innovations have become an unquestioned sine qua non of everyday life. Our living conditions change rapidly, often without predictability, security, or critical reflexion. These changes easily turn into a form of political and social control of innovation-induced ruptures, keeping people on constant alert and making them abandon recently acquired practices for new ones. It can be argued that they represent a form of psychological coercion. Moreover, the growing pace of life-as-innovation, together with misguided assumptions and conclusions about life itself in the diversity of its local variations, produces new forms of inequality and misery among many societies around the globe. In the present paper, I explore how time, innovation, and values relate to each other in both academic life and life in general. I argue for prioritising well-informed reflexive works in the social sciences and the humanities against the pressures of time and frequently unfounded innovations.

"This edited volume explores conceptual and practical challenges in measuring well-being. Given the bewildering array of measures available, and ambiguity regarding when and how to measure particular aspects of well-being, knowledge in the field can be difficult to reconcile. Representing numerous disciplines including psychology, economics, sociology, statistics, public health, theology, and philosophy, contributors consider the philosophical and theological traditions on happiness, well-being and the good life, as well as recent empirical research on well-being and its measurement. Leveraging insights across diverse disciplines, they explore how research can help make sense of the proliferation of different measures and concepts, while also proposing new ideas to advance the field. Some chapters engage with philosophical and theological traditions on happiness, well-being and the good life, some evaluate recent empirical research on well-being and consider how measurement requirements may vary by context and purpose, and others more explicitly integrate methods and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. The final section offers a lively dialogue about a set of recommendations for measuring well-being derived from a consensus of the contributors. Collectively, the chapters provide insight into how scholars might engage beyond disciplinary boundaries and contribute to advances in conceptualizing and measuring well-being. Bringing together work from across often siloed disciplines will provide important insight regarding how people can transcend unhealthy patterns of both individual behavior and social organization in order to pursue the good life and build better societies"--

The sciences and the humanities are treated as two incompatible discourses and the former enjoys a superior status both within and outside the academic society. This dominance of science as a discourse synonymous with knowledge while humanities and its methods are devaluated come from the assumption that scientific domain is a linear progression of facts discovered using a rational methodology. Thus, it's worthwhile to lay bare the ruptures and the remedial rhetoric that lie behind the façade of 'objectivity' and 'rationality' in science in order to revise the existing academic framework. My attempt here is to re-articulate the discourse of science as shaped and subject to elements traditionally thought to be extra scientific or even anti-scientific in the positivist notion of science. Drawing from the postpositivist philosophy of science put forth by Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend which dismisses an objective methodology in science, this paper argues that rhetoric plays a constitutive role in scientific knowledge by making scientific progress possible. By establishing rhetoric rather than methodology as the decisive element in the advancement of science, the boundaries between science and non-science begin to blur.