Personas is a project by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab currently on display at their Metropath(ologies) exhibition. In their words:

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.

Personas prompts you to enter your name and crawls the web looking for material about you in order to complete a visual profile based on the semantic analysis of the data found. The analysis is performed against a corpus of data to come up with the categories that better describe you, these resulting on the different strands that compose your unique visual identity.
The project is meant as a critique on the trust we put on automated processes to make sense of data by way of data-mining. In an age where reliance on data seem to be everywhere computers still come up with as many incredible insights than obvious mistakes.

The case in point are the three searches I tried. Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Gordon Brown.

Gates seems to be big in the online word but not much seems to be happening on the business, philanthropy or software side or things.

Murdoch’s presence in the media world seems to be much smaller than what he has lead us all to believe.

Finally I was quite happy to see our prime minister be quite active on the political front. I hoped there was a bit more of a presence on the economic side of things.
Great project, beautifully executed. via TechCrunch

Tags: machine-learning, visualisation