PERSONAS: HOW REALITY IS DISTORTED BY DATAMINING

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http://personas.media.mit.edu/

DATAMINING , DATAWAREHOUSING are tools usefull"per se" . As any quant tools are ...just quantitative;by no way could it be qualitative: the simple concept of "quality" is non objective but utterly subjective or partially subjective once shared within a cognitive group dynamic.
Same for relevance: 10 kg of feathers falling on your toes do procure minor damages of just a 1 kg of lead ...but the numerical relvance of the formers is 10 times higher than the latter.
So? Empirically this is what happens with the net ,and PPERSONA is tis a way to gaping at the state of the art and realize how many different realities are out there.
The presentism..

Enjoy.

All my heartful thanks to G.D for the hint on Persona



Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!).

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.

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. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.