Affective Landmarking – An App to Close Read with Your Emotions

Come interact with a tool that turns close reading into a color spectrum. Affective Landmarking is an annotation style where readers highlight passages in a text and tag them with emotional responses, such as fear, joy, etc. Those tags are visualized in real time, mapping the diverse reading experiences to reflect emotional clusters, overlaps, or disappearances across a text.

The project was experimented with in a first-year writing classroom at Queens College, where students read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and annotated their responses together.

AL asks: What happens when emotions drive analysis, and subjective experience is valued, especially when reading controversial texts? This project treats that data as relational and participatory. Going forward, this style could open up possibilities for comparative studies across classrooms, organizations, and communities, asking people to read slowly in the age of quickness.

Come try this process, engage with the app, and learn more!

Bio: This project was built by Meha Gupta, a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she works at the intersection of digital humanities, affect theory, physics, and race and ethnic studies. She teaches at Baruch College.