How the Internet sees me

MIT’s Media Lab recently launched Personas, a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group. 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.

It didn’t do a great job of creating my persona, due to either too much or too little data out there. There have been many John Gist‘s throughout history as I would find out.
However, what attracted me most to this experiment is the simplicity and ease of use in the design. Clearly labeled and color-coded, paired with real-time data aggregation make this a fun and exciting process. I ended up putting in all of my online aliases as well as some of my friends and family, just to watch the system run again.

Although the project cautions,

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

I wish it would give a bit more insight into how it classifies the data it is gathering. Why did my twitter username yield a persona that was 50% legal. Why did my name come back with 10% Religion?

Give it a shot and see how the Internet sees you here