COVID-19 Similes from English and Spanish Digital Media in 2020

A collection of 200 news items from digital newspapers in 2020, with 100 items each in English and Spanish, containing similes about the COVID-19 virus. The dataset was created by Maria Josep Cuenca and was last updated on October 14, 2025. It focuses on similes where the virus is either the target or the source of the comparison.

Use Cases

• Analyze the discursive functions of similes based on the described 'TARGET is like SOURCE' structure.
• Compare metaphorical framing of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the language (English vs. Spanish) mentioned in the description.
• Study how abstract concepts are described using the virus as a source, based on the 'X is like A VIRUS' pattern noted in the description.
• Train models for simile detection or classification based on the curated examples of virus-related comparisons.

Strengths

• Contains 200 specifically curated news items, providing a focused corpus.
• Includes a balanced sample of 100 English and 100 Spanish items for cross-linguistic comparison.
• Explicitly targets a specific linguistic structure ('TARGET is like SOURCE') for analysis.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to its 2020 coverage of the pandemic's first waves.

Provenance

Source

Maria Josep Cuenca via e-cienciaDatos Harvested Dataverse.

Collection Method

Likely collected through manual or automated extraction from digital newspapers.

Time Range

2020

Freshness

Last updated 2025-10-14 21:28:50; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Not specified; inferred from English and Spanish language media sources.