New Citizen Science Project: Reading Emotions!

We’ve launched our latest Citizen Science initiative. As part of the Citizen Readers project, whose aim is to unlock the nature of human storytelling using community-centred AI, we have created “Reading Emotions.”

As we all know, emotions are complicated. Figuring out what you are feeling at any given moment is of course difficult. This is also true of literary characters. They experience a complex range of emotions that will sometimes be more or less explicit. It’s that range and subtlety that propels us as readers through a story as we connect with someone else’s intimate inner life.

Debates about how to classify emotions are legion in academic research. In our project, we want to surface the full range of readers’ potential responses. For this reason we are using an open-text response approach. Readers are given a single sentence and then asked to write in all of the emotions that they feel the character is experiencing in that moment. We provide a list of possible emotions to help you decide, but it is really up to you. You don’t have to follow any schema just trust your gut.

Come join and help out!