Reflections [I] Conceptual Spaces At Work: Lund University, Sweden, May 2012

I started writing up and reflecting on my notes while still in Lund on Saturday evening 26th May. As I passed the taxi rank returning to my B&B I knew Eurovision had started: Englebert sang out. It was quite novel to be in Sweden that night.

The conference was excellent.

Lund is a beautiful, friendly city and the weather was amazing.

I am so pleased I made this journey and would like to thank the organisers and sponsors for their work and support. The conference was free to attend, which greatly assisted me. Speakers were in the majority which added to the event's value for me (and the other participants). Some of the presentations included maths and logic, but as I was advised initially I could follow the gist of all the presentations and the details of many.

If you are a nurse, social worker, occupational therapist... and you read through these follow-up posts you may well wonder how is this relevant to healthcare? Well at the moment that is unclear, but I'm sure there is a connection. I'll share some tentative connections here and add some photographs over the next few weeks or so. As I review my scribbled notes I may have made some mistakes, missed out key points and references are still appearing, but here goes ...

The first session on Thursday was by Carita Paradis, who presented White aromas and subtle oak spices: From sensory experiences to language through conceptual spaces. Carita's focus was wine tasting with its four sensory modalities of VISION, SMELL, COLOR, and TASTE and a descriptors list for the properties of wines, such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry. There is a corpus as the paper explains:

... the source of data used in this investigation is the American wine magazine, the Wine Advocate. The corpus contains 84,864 wine reviews published 1989 – 2006. The total number of words used is 8,332,666 and the number of different words is 46,000 (for more information about the corpus as such and an interactive information visualization (InfoViz) tool to be used to retrieve different kinds of information about the wines reviewed, both linguistic information and metadata, ... p.4.

In addition for both red and white wines there is an aroma wheel. It was helpful in the Q&A at the end to be reminded of the relative dominance of the senses. Questions had me recalling the emotional and reflexive response of disgust and how this is 'hardwired' - the limbic system and connected to other senses. The findings of a lower to higher directionality in modalities - touch through to sound and vision and the use of metaphors and the direction of these: soft light OK but not light softness was fascinating.

So, there are more reasons for a blog post than the four senses referred to by Carita. What descriptors are there for the four care domains (interpersonal, sciences, political and social)? How can they be discovered (or recovered)? Where is the corpus for nursing? Is there a secondary source? Is there a case for a different approach? Are there several in the form of nursing classification and terminology systems?

As to the other sense: I also wondered about the sound of money and advertising (of alcohol), generally more tightly controlled in Sweden as I understand, especially advertising aimed at children.

Carita Paradis & Mats Eeg-Olofsson, Describing sensory experience recontextualization through properties, objects and imagery in discourse, Lund University