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Step Outside Yourself: See Yourself as the Internet Does

By grrlscientist on August 21, 2009.

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GrrlScientist Personas [larger view]

Personas is an interesting program that searches for online references to you and uses it to create a piece of art that describes you. To do this, it analyzes these references for repeated words and phrases and builds a graphic (like the one you see above) that "describes" you. It's really interesting because you can watch the process as it builds this picture and gives you some food for thought regarding the sorts of information that is "out there" about you. It's almost as disturbing as reading your credit report (which I did earlier today for the first time, and found it to be profoundly upsetting and depressing, especially the numerous inaccuracies that I now have to appeal and fight, and will likely spend the rest of my natural life trying to correct).

Tags
Art
Internet
online information
personas
Technology
Art

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Hmmm. This made me step so far outside myself that most of the stuff it analysed were other people. And it included these two, only one of which is me:

BOB O'HARA IS A WORKAHOLIC WHO ADMITTEDLY HAS NOT BEEN THERE FOR HIS WIFE AS MUCH AS HE SHOULD HAVE

FINAL WORD: BOB O'HARA IS NOT A CAT, AND SCOTT KEIR IS NOT A CUPCAKE

I hope you can excuse my light-hearted poke, but for you "accident" barely rates a mention?!

Maybe things have gotten better :-) Long may they stay that way.

I tried Personas, but it didn't really seem to work for me.

By DeafScientist (not verified) on 22 Aug 2009 #permalink

don't know what it all means forme since all my categories were exactly even sized except the management category- which was huge.

Saw this at Chad's place too - no science categories, two music categories, sports seems to pull all sorts of unrelated terms. Very interesting idea, but the execution totally flopped.

It doesn't seem to have a means to remove references to people who are not you.

Very interesting idea, but the execution totally flopped.

i agree. i am completely mystified as to how the word "family" was even mentioned for me (why would i talk about something i don't have?), unless they are collecting taxonomic "family" references for birds .. and sports? that might be horse racing and world cup futbol for me, but neither are a major topic of conversation at the level implied by that graphic .. and "fashion" .. puhleeze! that is absolutely ridiculous. i am not even sure that i use that word more than once or twice per year! on the other hand, "medical" rates a MUCH larger space on that graphic for me, for obvious reasons.

hrm. this reminds me of my credit report. maybe i should do some drinking, specifically to kill those neurons.