Metaphors can Help Humanities Students Learn Data Analytics

What is it about?

This paper examines how metaphors can help teach data analytics to humanities students. With more courses combining AI and data analytics with the humanities, it's important to understand how to best design and teach these programs. The author focuses on using metaphors, not just for their cognitive benefits, but also for how they help students understand and engage with complex concepts. The paper outlines four main areas to consider: representation, emotion, production, and interaction. It reviews recent studies that show how different types of metaphors can affect students' skills and attitudes, how students creatively use metaphors to understand data analytics, and how both students and teachers unconsciously engage with metaphors during lessons. These studies use various methods, including classroom experiments, surveys, skin conductance tests, and discourse analysis. The overall finding is that metaphors CAN make data analytics concepts more accessible and interesting for humanities students, as long as the metaphors are Customizable, Agile, and feel Natural to the learners.

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