Personas: What do you look like online?

By Nicholas Rougeux, posted on August 18, 2009 in Art

Personas, an online component of an exibit at the MIT Museum, shows you how the Internet sees you by scanning the web and categorizing you with predefined labels. It's a fun experiment, but needs some tweaking to keep people engaged.

Running my name through it a few times resulted in several different graphs.

Persona graph with ephasis on 'illegal' and 'sports' categories

Persona graph with ephasis on 'professional' and 'sports' categories

Persona graph with ephasis on 'sports' and 'medicine' categories

The most interesting part is when it's scanning and showing how different information influences the final graph. It would be so much more interesting if each part were interactive so one could hover over one and see why they might be in the illegal, sports, or aggresion category. I know I'd love to know why I fit into those considering they don't really apply to me. It's still a fun exhibit and worth trying out.

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