project: MyDatabody, visualizing the network

Dit project is tot stand gekomen in samenwerking met Maya Aujla, Daphne Ben Shachar, Piet Walraven, James Mostert, Bram Slits (en ik). Hier volgt een introductie…

(Engels)

A growing amount of personal information about a growing amount of people becomes publicly available online. When Google-ing someone’s name, it’s normal these days that a whole list of data pops up that could consist of, among others: career related data, past activities, holiday pictures, blogging and commenting, Social Network (SN) profile data, etc. At first it were merely youngsters that have been familiar with using the internet their whole life that did not really care about privacy (or did not realize the importance) and put all their information out there, available and for grabs for everybody. Not long ago also older generations have joined in and are uploading more and more personal content to the web. These are some interesting trends that will probably become more prominent in the near future.

This project has aimed at creating new insights in this phenomenon of publicly available online personal data. After a first brainstorm session about the current situation of peoples’ ‘online lives’, we all agreed that the visualization that we were supposed to develop would have to serve several relevant goals. First of all we wanted to enhance people’s awareness about privacy online, not by condemning their behavior, but by visualizing something and leave the judgment to the users themselves. A second and very important goal which is closely related to the first is that our visualization must give insights in the amount and extensiveness of people’s data online. As a result our visualization will provide people with the possibility to compare different groups of internet users. So our application provides people with interesting new insights in the different ways people use MySpace. With this application we can create insights in how users with specific cultural or demographic characteristics use MySpace in a different way.
After discussing the subject of personal data available online and putting it together with the goals, we started going through possible ways of visualizing our ideas. It did not take long before we were all very enthusiastic about a metaphoric visualization that could show ones detailed and personal publicly available data. The idea originated from a theory: the data body. A data body is all the data available online of someone. It can exist of for instance: background information, comments, interests, general info, etc. In the case of our visualization the data body is everything that is filled in on a MySpace profile.
We got even more enthusiastic about our idea when we did a brief desk research on the concept data body or applications and visualizations available online that depict somebody’s profile extensiveness. It turned out that most of the SN’s we knew did not have any indication for the completeness. Some of the SN’s we looked at indicate the completeness by a percentage. In the most innovative case (LinkedIn) we found the profile completeness depicted in a bar chart. After this finding and some more brainstorm sessions we were all very confident to take our

confident to take our idea to the next level; we decided to make the depiction interactive, give it a global touch, and even make it social by depicting a user with geographical (inter)related friends. Also, we agreed on the form of our application; we were going to make a widget that would trigger people to click on and play with.

Based on all our initial thoughts, deskresearch findings, and early conceptualising we have set up the following problem statement for his project:
“No visualisation tool/plugin exists to visualise a so-called databody of a person’s profile on a social network”
We will tackle this problem by firstly describing all relevant theory. This includes theory on social networks in general, online identity theory, network theory, and theory concerning the data body. Secondly we will describe the functional design of our application. In this part a detailed overview of MyDataBody is provided. Subsequently after the theory and functional design we will explain the major design choices we have made during the conceptualising stage of our project.

During the process of conceptualising and reading the relevant theory we also started setting up a scraper to collect as many MySpace profiles as possible. This process and the structuring of the raw data is described in the Implementation chapter. Finally before the conclusion we describe how we have actually built MyDataBody and for who the application is potentially relevant.

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