Sentiments

The Problem

Nostalgia is typically studied at a distance — surveys, interviews, retrospective analysis. But nostalgia is fundamentally a felt experience, deeply personal and emotionally textured. Traditional research methods capture what people say about nostalgia, not what they feel in the moment of remembering. We wanted to create a research instrument that could evoke and explore nostalgic experience in real time.

What We Built

Sentiments is an interactive journal that uses AI-driven conversation to explore academic nostalgia through research-creation. The project is part of the Nostagain Network — North America's first student-led research collective studying the generative potential of nostalgia, based at Concordia University's TAG Lab and Milieux Institute.

The platform hosts three distinct AI chatbot personas, each designed to engage with nostalgia differently:

• Chatbot — A baseline conversational agent that explores general nostalgic memories through open-ended dialogue
• Jay Mort — A themed persona that probes cultural and collective memory, engaging with shared nostalgic touchpoints
• S.A.M. — A specialized agent focused on guided nostalgic journaling, helping participants articulate and reflect on personal memories

Each agent operates as an independent module — the architecture is deliberately modular so that each chatbot can evolve independently as the research questions develop.

My Role

I was part of the five-person development team, contributing to the platform architecture, chatbot integration, and front-end development. I also contributed to the research design — helping define how AI conversation could serve as a method for nostalgia research rather than just a tool.

Technologies

Vue, Vite, Tailwind CSS, LLM API integration, modular chatbot architecture, Node 20, Render deployment.

Outcome

The project operates as both a research instrument and a research-creation artifact. Participants don't just provide data — they have genuine nostalgic experiences mediated by AI, generating insights that traditional survey methods would miss. The platform has been used in symposia and research sessions hosted by the Nostagain Network, with findings contributing to a growing body of work on nostalgia's creative and generative potential.