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Analysis of institutional authors

Pérez-Sobrino PAuthor

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December 13, 2022
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Rest in space, Starman! Creative reframing of death metaphors on David Bowie’s mural in London

Publicated to:Discourse Studies. 24 (5): 566-589 - 2022-10-01 24(5), DOI: 10.1177/14614456221108586

Authors: Hidalgo-Downing L; Pérez-Sobrino P

Affiliations

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - Author
Universidad de La Rioja - Author

Abstract

This article explores the way in which death metaphors written in the urban mural for David Bowie in London contribute to creatively reframing the artist’s death. While research on death metaphors has focussed on traditional written genres such as obituaries and epitaphs, studies of urban memorials and shrines have focussed on the creation of fandom identities, downplaying the role played by figurativity, creativity and emotional connotation. The present article aims to bridge the gap between these two areas of study by presenting a corpus-based study of 585 items written on the mural for David Bowie. The research questions are: (1) How is Bowie’s death (metaphorically) conceptualised? (2) To what extent are death metaphors in Bowie’s mural creative? and (3) What is the relationship between the metaphorical framing of Bowie’s death and the projection of emotional connotations? The findings of our study reveal that Bowie’s songs emerge as a highly productive metaphorical source domain to understand the artist’s death, in which fans recontextualise lines from Bowie’s lyrics in creative and positive ways.

Keywords

Creative metaphorDavid bowie mural and shrineDeath metaphorsEmotional connotationRecontextualisation

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Discourse Studies due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2022, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Anthropology. Notably, the journal is positioned above the 90th percentile.

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-07-27:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 8.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 9 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 20.85.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 5 (Altmetric).
  • The number of mentions in news outlets: 2 (Altmetric).

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: Last Author (PEREZ SOBRINO, PAULA).