notes
a sketch of an interactive affective portrait
7 october 2003
A Sketch of An Interactive Affective Portrait
I have sketched an interactive portrait that can be generated from any text-based online forum. I have often found that "profiles" constitute an overly general portrait of a person, not necessarily in terms of attributes important to a particular person so much as attributes that are generic enough to accomodate all users. My hope for an interactive portrait is partially justified by my work in the linguistic modeling of personal attitudes from the text of online forums. (cf. "What Would They Think?") In this work, computational models of a person's atittudes were automatically generated from a history of a person's participation in an online forum, or a history of posts to a weblog. This models powered a digital persona that could react to typed text by being aroused, showing pleasure and displeasure, and showing confidence or weakness. In my opinion, learning about a person through interaction rather than by viewing a static representation allows more information to be conveyed in a more just-in-time manner. I'd like to think of not one, but three faces for each interactive portraiture.
The "impressed" face is a digital persona derived from the history of a person's expressed atittudes in an online forum. The "expressed" face is a digital persona that can be programmed by a person, and is thus a self-representation. The external "face" relates how a whole community feels about a person expressing a particular topic. In the above sketch, Seymour Papert claims to be quite postive and aroused by "LOGO." However, this is inconsistent with the history of how he has talked about LOGO (impressed), in which he has never seemed very excited about it (represented by the darkened face). Finally, the community that Seymour is in has always reacted quite favorably and excitedly about Seymour on the topic of "LOGO". The hope is that the juxtaposition of these three representations will help to inform the audience about the consistency between what Seymour presents himself to be (expressed), what he has been in the past (impressed), and how others have perceived him to be (external), thus helping the audience decide Seymour's reputability.