Personas – How does the Internet see you?

Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab…

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. 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.