Affective Diary is the process of collecting information through the use of a portable computer (such as a mobile phone) and an array of sensors (cameras, biometric sensors etc) in order to make a detailed registry of all daily activities of a study's participant.
It is intimately related to the phenomenon of the Quantified Self Movement, on which I'm writing my thesis, so I thought this might be a good method on which to base at least some of my autoethnographic exploration of the topic.
The Affective Diary is, in a sense, an evolution of the blogging movement, which itself is an evolution of the need to keep diaries. While a person writing a diary has to remember, select and write down the data they wish to keep (or share, when blogging), the Affective Diary collects all: passive video capture, mobile context (GPS and GSM location, nearby wireless networks), mobile activity (calls, messages, emails), biometrics (heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature, motion) and active capture (conscious decisions to note down a certain passage or to capture a picture, etc). It should also allow the user to capture emotions, that the system can the correlate to the context: happiness, gloominess, even hunger.
Just like a diary, the Affective Diary is a good tool for self-reflection, but just like the diary, it can suffer from the WORN effect - Write Once, Read Never. While a diary can show itself useless because the self-editing can lead to the information you're looking for in the future not being captured, the Affective Diary suffers from the same effect for the opposite reason: too much uncategorized information can lead to an unreadable and unprocessable mass of information.
It is also intimately related to sousveillance, the inverse of surveillance (sous meaning under while sur means over in French), the act of capturing video and audio of your environment (as well as other pieces of information). Sousveillance was a term coined by Steve Mann, who also invented Natural User Interfaces, High Dynamic Range photography, scratch input and many other HCI strategies.
In a sense, the Quantified Self Movement, Affective Diaries and Sousveillance are different ways to look at the same phenomenon for different reasons: you sousveil to fight surveillance or to collect evidence (as in alibi sousveillance, where you generate evidence that no wrongdoing has taken place, like when installing a camera to your dashboard); you quantify to know more about your health and to understand the effects of your physical activities on your own body and you make an affective diary to keep track of your activities.
The Affective Diary was, not so long ago, a pipe-dream, impracticable because of the high price of the equipment involved and the extra weight. Nowadays it's much easier to make a comprehensive log with the stuff we already carry around and new products such as the fitbit and Google Glass are only expanding the capacity to collect more and more information about yourself and the environment, 24/7.
What remains constant is the researcher's capacity to analyse that data. The risk of the WORN effect is very big, the mass of information too impenetrable to process completely. Better tools and analysis strategies must be developed to make sense of all the information gathered through such methods, running the risk of turning all that collection moot.
References
Machajdik, J, Hanbury, A, Garz, a, Sablatnig, R, (2011) "Affective computing for wearable diary and lifelogging systems: An overview" in "Proceedings of the ÖAGM / AAPR Workshop", Graz, Austria.
Ståhl, A, Höök, K, (2008). "Reflecting on the design process of the Affective Diary". In "Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges" (NordiCHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
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