Who are we all really? Have you always wanted to know how you are seen by the Internet World?
An art installation displayed in the MIT Museum produced by the MIT social media group aims to answer that very question.
I came across the website for the piece while randomly surfing the web. http://personas.media.mit.edu/
Its own description best describes how it works taken from their front page.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). 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.
So I tried to search cminion as its the name I go by online.
Below is my first set of results.
Now I don’t feel I’m that interested in art, or that my name would ever be associated with art but obviously i am an online art connoisseur. I do admit though this entry is about a piece of art.
Out of curiosity I decided to try again, with the same name.
Now suddenly my largest section is Illegal…. Well I wasn’t sure what to say, maybe I am an art thief secretly…. Maybe in the previous two minutes minutes my rapidly changing interests has gone from famous art works to laundering the money from my sales of stolen art.
I decided to try one last time to see if there would be any similarity with it and the previous two.
Now I know this is all a bit of fun, but I would expect some sort of coloration between the three searches that happened within a ten minute period.
If you are on the west of the pond and fancy seeing this curious piece of art it is on display until the end of this month at the MIT Museum.
Please post a link to your own person below…
We talked about this on Dogear Nation lately… it’s an interesting enough visualisation but clearly not specific enough to an individual and the variation between runs is just weird.