Toon Vanagt's Thought Valve
Posts Tagged ‘Personas’
Why I like my MIT data portrait and why you should get yours
August 22nd, 2009
Personas Data Portrait Toon Vanagt
Tonight I stumbled upon this MIT personas project, which generates a real time data portrait of your online identity. Apart from being a cool data visualization project, I think it is a great illustration of large dataset processing and an educative warning for on-line privacy. During the processing of one’s character the most information is shown. I was stunned by the animation and personalized content generated by the flash application. It seems I grew up with my pants down 
“Personas uses sophisticated natural language processing and shows you how the Internet sees you.
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.”
If you’ve left traces on the internet and aren’t  cursed/blessed with on-line homonyms, you’ll be stunned by how much the internet knows about you. Enter first name & last name here to share feelings about your generated portrait belowÂ
About Me
Internet entrepreneur. Proud founder of Casius.com, Virtualisers.be, Virtualization.com, Promex.be and 2 sons. Not necessarily in that order. Read more...
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