Today almost everybody has at least one digital representation in one of the numerous social communities, like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. We tend to create these profiles to express ourselves, find friendship, connections and gain reputation. The profile data is constantly altered, retouched and updated to create a comprehensive image which draws attention, the currency of the web.
The bachelor thesis IDENTITAT - The "Gestalt" of digital identity - by Jonas Loh and Steffen Fiedler aims at evaluating how a digital identity is generated, in order to determine certain parameters on which a comparable analysis of the digital identity is possible. More than one hundred thousand personal raw data sets were crawled from the web to fill these parameters with subject matters. After the analysis phase, the data was visually abstracted and interpreted to give the disembodied digital identity a unique and characteristic "Gestalt" in form of a generated sculpture.
Focusing on specific data for comparison, the digital identities of eight specific people were recorded and observed through a custom webcrawler. Their consumerist (amazon), communication behavior (twitter), interests (delicious) and listening habits (last.fm) were saved in a custom database. Furthermore this data was analysed in detail to determine four parameters that generated the form of the sculpture.