A fun little online toy called “Personas” allows you to enter a name, preferably your own” and then have it mapped into a collection of categories.
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.
The visuals are impressive and the resulting graph has alot of style, however the searching could use some work. With a name like “Randall Hand” it found alot of what I think is NSFW material (“Randall’s hand” was in alot of odd places). Try it out for yourself and see what you get.
via Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman.
