Data Portraits

(image via Swiss Miss)

The Swiss Miss posted this great link to a project by some nerd/fellow PhD freak named Aaron Zinman at the MIT Media Labs. The project, Personas, basically goes through the web, draws info using a mysterious algorithmic process and puts up a 'seemingly authoritative' profile. Here's the underlying philosophy:

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.

Try it here.