Colour Me Emotional

Colour Me Emotional is a 2pp A5 Educational Resource that was created for SWISP Lab's (2023) Hacking the Anthropocene Kit (HAK.io). The Colour Me Emotional resource supports young people to think through how they might code emotion data generated during SWISP Lab's Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) workshops. Colour Me Emotional came out of SWISP Lab's year-long Digital Dispositions collaboration with MDAP data scientist Amanda Belton, who adopted PyPlutchik's open source code to explore a computational approach to coding large datasets for emotion and/or affect. PyPlutchik marries Python code to a large crowd-sourced emotion-association lexicon based on Plutchik's wheel of emotions to computationally map different types and intensities of emotion. Our interest in the intersections between big and little data prompted SWISP Lab to create this Colour Me Emotional resource and introduce it into the 'Careful Coding' sessions that are embedded in the Hacking the Anthropocene workshops. We wanted to see how our human co-researchers would think with Plutchik in very small (n=1) and deeply situated data. We found that young people like the way Plutchik's emotion flower is a model that acknowledges emotions can be multiple, potentially conflicting, and occur at varying intensities. These Colour Me Emotional resources are a 'hot' items, frequently needing to be replaced.