DPHU1008 Chap.6 Affect, Embodiment and Affective Labour
Affect, Embodiment and Affective Labour
Lecture 5 asks what data do to bodies. The syllabus frames the week around how media influence emotions, bodily responses and behaviour, and how affect shapes political ideologies and social movements.
The extra reading defines affect theory as thought about embodied experience and relations between bodies; following Silvan Tomkins, affects are bodily responses that arrive before recognition and become emotions once learned scripts name them.
The workshop uses the circumplex model, which places feelings on dimensions of pleasantness and energy.
The storytelling workbook's principle of legitimising embodiment and affect lets feeling count as a way of knowing, which matters for the affective data renderings you will design in Assessment 3. The required reading by Phil Jones turns to affective labour: platforms frame online microwork as play and pay it like a wager, disguising human labour as automated service.
The affect workshop is flagged on Moodle as something you must show understanding of in Assessment 3, so this chapter matters most when you design.
Ask what your redesign should make a viewer feel, which design choice produces that feeling, and which reading justifies it. The same questions help you judge other renderings: what feeling is being produced, and who benefits from it?
What this chapter covers
- 01
Affect: being moved before naming the feeling
- 02
Affect and emotion: bodily response versus scripted name
- 03
Circumplex model: pleasantness and energy
- 04
Affective data renderings designed to move viewers
- 05
Politics of affect: whom a feeling serves
- 06
Affective labour and hidden microwork
- 07
Microwork framed as play, with pay turned into a wager
- 08
Silence and the unsaid as carriers of affect
Worked example · free
Reading the affect of a road-safety campaign
- +1Name the affect: the scale and darkness produce a slow, heavy response, low energy and unpleasant on the circumplex.
- +1Embodiment: viewers stand before a wall of names, so the data are felt through the body and the setting, not read as a statistic.
- +1Politics of affect: the grief is directed toward safer driving, but a critical reading asks whether it also shifts attention away from road design.
Key terms
- Affect
- A bodily response to someone or something that arrives before it is recognised and named.
- Embodiment
- The idea that knowing and feeling happen through the body, not only through language.
- Affective labour
- Work whose conditions include producing or managing feelings, such as excitement, anxiety or calm.
- Circumplex model
- Watson and Tellegen's model placing emotions on two dimensions, pleasantness and energy.
- Microwork
- Small, separately paid online tasks that train and correct systems presented as automated.
- Politics of affect
- The ways feelings are produced and directed to support or resist particular ideas and powers.
Affect, Embodiment and Affective Labour FAQ
What is the difference between affect and emotion?
In the reading, an affect is an immediate bodily response, such as blushing, that arrives before you recognise it. An emotion is that response after a learned script has named it, such as shame or pride.
Why does a data course study feelings?
Viewers meet a rendering with their bodies first, through colour, scale, faces and sound. Those responses shape how the numbers are believed, so analysing a rendering without its affect misses part of its power.
How does Jones's chapter connect to affect?
Jones shows platforms describing workers as players and treating pay as a reward, managing workers' feelings while hiding their labour behind the language of automation. That makes the conditions of data work part of the week's question.
How can silence carry affect in a rendering?
The extra reading argues that bodies register harm that language struggles to name, and that silence can be both an effect of power and a form of resistance. An empty space or absent figure in a rendering can therefore move viewers as strongly as a number.
What is an affective data rendering?
It is a rendering designed to move the viewer, through scale, colour, sound, touch or human faces, so that the data are felt as well as read. The course asks you to evaluate such renderings and to make one for Assessment 3.
Assessment move
Keep an affect diary for one week: note three renderings that moved you, place each on the circumplex and record which design choice did the moving. Summarise Tomkins's distinction in two sentences of your own. When reading Jones, list every term platforms use instead of 'worker' and what feeling each term encourages.
Revisit the circumplex after each lecture and place the week's main rendering on it, adding a sentence on whom that feeling serves. Sketch one rendering of your own that uses absence or silence to carry a feeling.
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