Just discovered this site/project, Personas. Through your online activity and findings, it creates a profile that relates to different subjects. A very interesting project with a fantastic interface, animations and graphics.
You can try it yourself by visiting the website, here.
Here is some text as taken straight from the website:
What is Personas?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at theMIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
How does it work?
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.
Philosophy
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates 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.
Credits
Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.
source: swissmiss’ twitter
