aggression | accident
Personas is a project by Aaron Zinman, a student in the Sociable Media Group at MIT, which turns your name into data-art by mining the Internet for mentions of it and visualizing the patterns found.
Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer's uncanny insights and 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 - for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.
My name doesn't yield a lot of results, but what it does come up with is a little disturbing:
[personas, via lifehacker]
Tags: the interweb