This project is a cultural and technical toolkit for small towns which is designed to bring local people and local political entities together based on emotions, personal perceptions as well as environmental pollution data. The concept is that local democracy requires a broad holistic view of towns in order to deal with challenges such as social changes, economic development, peak oil and climate change.

This unique toolkit brings together three different levels:

1 Personal Perception / Body arousal. This level involves workshops with local people, where they can use two specially designed electronic circuits which measure emotional arousal as well as noise level. They re-explore their town by going for a walk while carrying these tools and creating a communal map when they return to the project base

2 Opinions / Pollution meansurement. This level involves distributing a series of unique pollution sensors / voting stations around the town. The 8 sensor units are designed to be mounted on lampposts across the town to give a wide coverage of differnt environments.

3 Visulisation, Interpretation & Discussion. This level involves collecting together all the data and insight from the other levels displaying and interpreting results for a large public discussion.

The toolkit was trialed for 4 months in Hedehusene, Denmark where it brought together local people and council members in deliberating the future of this small town which is supposed to double in size in the next 10 years.

“At first I was suspicious but when I saw this project I was amazed.
This is brilliant and will change the way we do things round here”

- Poul Bonderup Poltitician responsible for Hedehusene

Project Website (In danish)

The software uses a dictonary of positive and negative affect (emotion) words such as “lovely, great,terrible” to draw a series of word clouds. Red is positive, blue negative while the yellow cloud shows the 10 most frequently used words for the text with stop words like “the, and , it” removed.
The resulting diagram is both a content summary as well as an indication of its emotional slanting.

The Affect Browser is a tool I developed for myself in order to help with research into controversial technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification Tags . I am using this tool in workshop settings in order to allow participants to think deeper and sideways about techno/social problems. The software allows visual brain storming for the communal deliberation of a topic lexicon and classification of topic actors. The resulting maps become powerful visualisations of this enquiry and lend themselves well to public communication via electronic display or print reproduction.

If you would like to organise a workshop, exhibit some of my maps or commission a custom map on a particular topic please get in touch

Anyway I thought this was too useful a tool to keep to myself so I thought I thought to make it publically available. Load in a single or multiple a text from the internet or your hardrive and navigate with the arrow keys and the < > keys to zoom. The Space Bar resets the view. Make links and then export as a PDF.

Download application for OSX 2meg (version alpha 5)

I am sure there are many bugs. Please email me with bugs and suggestions and i will get a new version out soon!

“Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience.”
(Eric Shouse 2005)

Speech is performative “in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (Austin 1976). In this sense then the Affect Browser shows the emotional state of the text (author) but also how it is meant to perform towards an audience ie. influence them.

What holds for the receiver also holds, for the same reason, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that will consitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearnace will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and written.
(Derrida 1977)

The aim of the Affect Browser is to interogate these text machines and find out how they perform their function.

Word authority more habit forming than heroin no this is not the old power addicts talk I am talking about a certain excercise of authority through the use of colorless words
form the user more than heroin and he must have more and more.
(William Burroughs 1967)

An Affect Map of 20 UK news websites. Note, the Sun newspaper website uses the words ‘Bingo’ and ‘Games’ with more frequency than ‘News’. ‘News’ doesn’t even appear in the Top 10 words on the Metro newspaper site while ‘Beyonce’ and ‘Barbecue’ do.