Digitising emotional geographies: technologies and techno-futures

This chapter explores how digital technologies shape and reshape how we feel, connect and understand emotions across space. It brings emotional geography into conversation with digital platforms, tools and methods, ranging from social media, Apps and digital visualisations to biosensing and AI, to examine how these technologies mediate emotional experience. While digital tools open fresh ways to trace affective patterns, they also raise challenges around representation, ethics and power. Drawing on various methodological examples, in the chapter we show how digital methods can extend and enrich emotional geography research, while also demanding critical engagement with how emotion is captured, categorised and understood. We argue for a mixed-methods approach that keeps focus on emotions as subjective, relational and situated, even as research scales up through automated and algorithmic tools. In doing so, we outline a research agenda for digital emotional geography that recognises the need for collaboration across disciplines and reflects carefully on digital technologies’ emotional and political lives.