Sunday, April 18, 2010
MIT's Personas application: Online visualization of querying and categorization system that searches and displays traces of YOU! (Metropath(ologies) Installation)
MIT's Personas application: Online visualization of querying and categorization system that searches the internet for digital traces of YOU!
"Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It is a critique of data mining, revealing the computer's uncanny insights and inadvertent errors. 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 largely opaque and socially ignorant" - Aaron Zonman (creator of Personas)
I know that I'm all over the place on the Internet. One of my assignments several years ago was to create and maintain a blog, and at that point, I no longer was anonymous. The damage was done. Below are three versions of my name as seen by the Personas application. If you happen to have lots of information on the web, the application limits the search in a random fashion. The first two screenshots were two entries of the same version of my name, but the results were a bit different.
Personas Home Page (From the home page, you can link to information about how the application works. It uses natural language processing and topic modeling to generate the visualization.)
Here is the Personas application in the form of an interactive exhibition, "Metropath(ologies)":
Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
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