All Kinds of Cool
... the Way the Web sees you ...
Just enter your name at the Personas project website and this innovative art project that is part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab will search the web for information and with its sophisticated natural language processing will create a portrait of your online identity.
Personas shows you a prose-like, colorful and shockingly accurate visual portrait of how the Internet sees you. While the algorithm compiles your information into predetermined categories you can view the computational process at each stage of the process.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
The process of it scouring the web for you name is probably actually cooler than the result.
From the Personas website:
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information
repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible
assistant. Personas demonstrate the computer's uncanny insights and
its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by
the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.
It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world,
where digital histories are as important if not more important than
oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital
traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
From the masks of actors in ancient Greek dramas, Carl Jung’s personality constructs to marketer's “personas” user types, we can add one more “self” to the repertoire of masks we wear when facing the world. Now we know how WWW sees us.
Read more:
http://www.techcrunch.com/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://www.examiner.com/...