Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Modelling Emotion: Algorithmic and Anthropological Approaches to Affect

About

What can robotics engineers and anthropologists learn from each other’s methods of modelling emotion? In the mid-1990s, computer scientists at MIT began examining affect from an algorithmic perspective, exploring ways software could track emotional patterns in users and imagining how a computer might even develop emotional capacities of its own. Meanwhile, in Japan, roboticists were analysing affect by building androids that expressed emotions like humans, questioning what it would mean to create a robot that could recognise and elicit emotion as well as fulfil humans’ emotional desires. Asking not only ontological but also ethical questions about affect, these technological interventions into the emotions engendered scientific practices by which modelling human emotion in machines required evaluating what makes for a ‘model’ emotional connection between humans and robots. Drawing on fieldwork among roboticists in Japan and affective computing scientists in the UK, this presentation analyses practices of emotion modelling in computing, robotics, and anthropological theory. It proposes that comparable strategies in these approaches to affect yield insights into ongoing problematisations of the relation between the concepts ‘affect’ and ’emotion’ in social theory, and offer tools for better documenting this relation methodologically through fieldwork.

 

Speaker biography

Daniel White is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in emotion, affect, and the

effects of technological development on human-environmental health in Japan, Hawaiʻi, and the Asia-Pacific Rim. For the last decade he has co-led a transdisciplinary research project that analyzes how non-Western models of emotion, including those from Buddhist traditions, can diversify technologies of artificial emotional intelligence. His recent work leverages anthropological theories of emotion to applied community work in human-environmental wellbeing in Japan and Hawaiʻi. His books include Administering Affect (Stanford 2022) and Affect as Cultural Critique (Toronto 2026). Other publications and project information can be found at modelemotion.org