“This research project analyzes the language used in a corpus of academic papers from 1956- 1976 generally considered to be the foundational documents of the field of artificial intelligence. Thirty-one papers were assembled and examined for evidence of the use of structural metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), first manually with an adapted version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz, 2007), and then through key-word-in-context searches (Deignan, 2008) with online corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine. Concordance data shows that the scientists frequently used metaphors to make sense of their work. Some structural metaphors used imagery from the same source domain, suggesting underlying root metaphors (Pepper, 1972), evidence of particular perspectives that comes to constitute the academic field. Root metaphors such as A MACHINE IS A BRAIN or RESEARCH IS A JOURNEY were extremely successful in communicating non- observable phenomena between scientists. Other structural metaphors appeared briefly in the literature but soon disappeared from discourse.”

Oliver Selfridge’s “Pandemonium” (1959) metaphor (inspired by Milton’s vision of hell in Paradise Lost) was created as a model for Artificial Intelligence research. It didn’t stick. The depiction above is from Human Information Processing, 2nd edition by Peter Lindsay and Donald Norman, 1977, Academic Press, Inc., New York (via David Bozak)