Does anyone remember an MIT Media Lab(?) project called Immersion(?), which let you input your email account and showed you your network of contacts via the to/from metadata? It's gone--but does something like it still exist?
(Asking for teaching, TIA!)
@inquiline the Center for Collective Learning open sourced the Immersion project, which appears to have been written in Java and Python.
Much would depend on whether the gmail client code still works.
@inquiline “TIA” = “Total Information Awareness”?
@adamgreenfield
haha, yes, sicko. i mean thanks in advance but yours is better!
@inquiline we should probably follow up on the whereabouts of Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov to know what may have become spinoff corporations: https://blog.ted.com/immersion-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-a-tool-that-maps-your-life-based-on-every-email-youve-ever-sent/
thanks!! this post might be useful in future semesters. in the past i recalled doing the tool myself and showing my results in class, and stressing to the students that there was no one else on earth connected to both my mom and my department chair, e.g. (the point of the lesson was ofc that even if message contents can't be intercepted without court orders, the NSA knows who i am and a lot about me just with the metadata, which it illustrated very well)
@inquiline here's Jagdish's graduate thesis on Immersion: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/95606
@inquiline ohh i remember that & thinking that it was a horrible idea...
