MIT Immersion project
by Adi Schlank
From the MIT Media Lab, a group of students have created Immersion, a project that allows anyone who wants to the ability to map their metadata through their Gmail account. By going to the website immersion.media.mit.edu and giving access to your Gmail account, it uses the content of your email to map out your personal and professional interactions in different perspectives. With everything done for you including retrieving the data, creating categories, and making a color scheme, the immersion project allows for “self-reflection, art, privacy, and strategy” on your network. By mapping out your email that contains a detailed description of your social interactions, you can map and plan effectively you connect with.
Being a very simple way to see your data, I decided to do my own metadata that I found to be very revealing. The image consists of all my interactions since I opened my account and reveals all the people with circles ranging in size depending how many emails passed between us. The data furthermore allows for a closer analysis by clicking on the circles and seeing exactly when you first started to email them, last email, sent, and received. It also categorizes people into networks if they were attached to the email as well. Through my metadata, I realize I mostly email people from school or the ones I have worked with.
