Center for Future Banking Seminar Series

ABSTRACT: Online identity is problematic. Without the body that anchors the self in the physical world it is easy to create multiple personas or to switch identities seemingly at will. Analyses of the problem are sometimes too limited, viewing identity only through the narrow lens of individual authentication - or too vague, resulting subjective arguments about the desirability or menace of malleable identities.

WHO: Judith Donath

WHAT: Center for Future Banking Seminar Series

WHEN: Thursday, March 5th at 1pm

WHERE: Wiesner Room, MIT Media Lab (2nd Floor)

Judith Donath will start this talk with fundamental concepts about identity, including personal versus social identity and the social construction and performance of identity. I will then discuss how signaling theory can help untangle issues around the veracity of identity representations and show how this can be the basis for designing new interfaces and visualizations, using examples drawn from projects in the Sociable Media Group.

BIOGRAPHY: Judith Donath is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Sociable Media research group. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from fields such as graphic design, urban studies, and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for online communities and virtual identities. She is known internationally for pioneering research in social visualization, interface design, and computer-mediated interaction. She created several of the early social applications for the Web, including the first postcard service (”The Electric Postcard”), the first interactive juried art show (”Portraits in Cyberspace”), and an early large-scale Web event (”A Day in the Life of Cyberspace”). Her work has been exhibited at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art and in several New York galleries; she directed “ID/Entity”, a series of installations about technology and portraiture. Her current research focuses on visualizing social interactions and creating innovative, mediated social environments. She is writing a book about our perception of identity in mediated and face-to-face interactions. Donath received her doctoral and master’s degrees in media arts and sciences from MIT, her bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, and has worked professionally as a designer and builder of educational software and experimental media