MIT Media’s Data Portraits & Personas
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How does the web see you?
That is the question that MIT Media wanted to depict visually by “creating a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.”
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.
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.”
Kinda neat, though I am not sure what the portrait (above) actually means.
See also
Persona
http://personas.media.mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/connections/
http://smg.media.mit.edu/Projects/Metropathologies/metro_finalcut2_web.mov
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Hat tip Flowing Data
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August 26th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
BR pondered
How does the web see you?
reply:
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Every since I started posting under my real name and using my real face (slightly younger and a little more handsome, though), I’ve lost all my privacy and my life has turned into a hell. I should have stayed off the grid. Good think I’m not in Facebook.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I just ran it for Ben Bernanke.
Looks like the program assigns categories to certain words. For example, “champ” is in the Sports category and “Governors” is in the Committee category. As the program scans the web you can see it highlight different terms in the text in different colors. So a news article referring to Bernanke as “the champ” got a hit in the Sports category. Kinda dumb, actually.
Then it puts it all together into a faux-spectroscopy strip. I guess that’s why they call it a piece of art.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
As a long dead Roman Emperor (albeit, one of the good ones).
August 26th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
BTW, I tried your gizmo program. One of the phrases that kept being analyzed was something about smelling like a dead hobo. What do you suppose they meant by that?
August 26th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Pretty soon somebody is going to ask the obvious question…
Why doesn’t “porn” show up anywhere?
Of course we all know that zero percent of TBP readers have seen porn in any way on the web, although statistically, that’s one of the most ubiquitous uses of the WWW.
Hmmm…
August 26th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
In my case the illegal to legal relationship is the inverse of yours by a substantial amount. Data mining indeed, what might be done with such information and what damage could occur before a remedy could be fashioned? I think it means nothing until it is qualified.
Best regards,
RF
August 26th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
They got the part about me being a Uzbek-speaking, deontological, neo-Keynsian post-modernist, but missed that I’m a Cubs fan. Can they do a version where you can change you’re own stuff like Zillow?
August 26th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
My cousin, valued customer, appears to be highly thought of. It looks like a frikkin’ love fest.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
There’s no science or technology either. Where does MIT fit in?
August 26th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I’m not sure what one can discern from this as “aggregated online identity” apparently refers to the aggregation of everyone on the web under the name submitted. If they had the submitter fill out a small questionnaire of information* used to establish a likelihood of a particular reference belonging to that person, it would be a lot more useful — but probably not to the person being queried.
* all email addresses, age, sex, nationality, educational history, medical history, credit card numbers, social security number, … just the things one could get from any $20 web investigation into anyone.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
…there is more than one me
August 26th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
The data miner also has a lot to say about Ben Dover. Ha HA.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Neat – but I’ve never seen a more inaccurate representation for my name. The largest category, by far, almost 20% is Military – books is a sliver, history non existent . . . .
August 26th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Not sure I want to try, given that I have the same name as a pirate captain who sailed out of Bermuda in the early 1700′s.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Thor Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Neat – but I’ve never seen a more inaccurate representation for my name. The largest category, by far, almost 20% is Military – books is a sliver, history non existent . . . .
reply:
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Why not use God Of Thunder for your last name? A lot of Scandinavian last names are more than one word.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
LOL .. you guys .. “Ben Dover”
August 26th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I’m always curious, so I input “Porn Erotic” for first and last name, it gave back two factors; illegal (4/5) and social (1/5).
Maybe the personas app. properly characterizes common prejudice after all.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
@ cvienne
whats porn?
BR – the portrait says that you are blue from an overload of professional management education and you need to ramp up your aggressive illegal medication…
August 26th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
My name, Dean Palmer, happens to be the same as a certain baseball player. I spent a long time (before ending it) to have it tell me all about my baseball persona. Ha! Ha!
August 27th, 2009 at 1:33 am
I know infoporn when I see it
August 27th, 2009 at 4:41 am
he’s the rainbow coalition all by himself.
August 27th, 2009 at 8:42 am
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August 27th, 2009 at 9:13 am
I’m too obscure. But “Adolf Hitler” generated a funny one!
ADOLF HITLER IS INNOCENT? HELLO, YOU EITHER HAVE JAVASCRIPT TURNED OFF OR AN OLD VERSION OF ADOBE’S FLASH PLAYER