Sociable Media Group
MIT Media Lab
20 Ames Street
E15-450, E15-401
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
+1 617 253 0323, +1 617 253 0358
{royrod, judith}@media.mit.edu
ABSTRACT
Online social spaces commonly abstract away the individual identity of participants, posing a visualization challenge in restoring this key social information. Beyond the common tradeoffs between space and amount of information displayed, visualizing individual identity involves differentiation of individuals in an online crowd, display of socially interesting information, and fluidity of navigation through the social information space. We have built a system that supports these three goals through popup graphical and textual displays of basic individual information. A major focus of our work is the notion of individual identity as a continuum, permitting rendering of identity at any level of detail.
Keywords
Online identity, social visualization, online social spaces, virtual communities, level-of-detail rendering. we are interested in basic information such as occupation, or on more personal details such as hobbies or favorite books. We focus on identity using this notion of a continuum of detail, allowing rendering at levels of detail ranging from simply a person’s name and face to an entire web site.
RELATED WORK
Social scientists have studied the expression and perception of individual identity in depth. Relevant findings emphasize the high information density of identity cues, as these cues are read within the context of a particular culture and situation [4]. Thus, even minor cues can generate a notable sense of identity, which is key for interpersonal interaction.
Mynatt et al, based on extensive experience with several network communities, remark that a sense of participants’ identity and relational status is required for collaborative communities to succeed [5]. Donath concurs, emphasizing the role of identity in making sense of interactions [1].
INTRODUCTION
Face-to-face interaction provides various opportunities for the exploration of individuals’ identity, ranging from their visual appearance, to public-persona information such as occupation, to more personal minutiae such as favorite authors or hobbies. A multitude of online social environments exist which allow interaction ranging in form from textual chat to videoconferencing. While these environments support meetings and conversation, they commonly abstract away the type of basic identity information that is effortlessly exchanged face-to-face in daily life both implicitly and through purposeful action [4].
This information serves important purposes such as helping us learn about the people around us, facilitating the ability to recognize them, and enabling and furthering interaction with people based on interesting personal qualities.
INTERACTION DESIGN
With this understanding of the key roles of identity we outlined a set of data that would most further an accessible and compelling sense of identity online. Basic pieces include the individual’s face and name, which allow for rapid and accurate visual recognition and association; displays of how much of a regular the individual is in the community [5] and how often they are active in the community at the same times as the viewer; and particular pieces of personal information such as hobbies, favorite authors, or occupation. Together, these pieces of individual information provide a foundation for identification and differentiation, and foster interaction based on triangulation
[7], that is, shared information surpassing a threshold of interest as a basis for conversation. In addition, this identity information is relevant in online situations ranging from newsgroups to textual and graphical chat rooms.
In addressing the display of individual identity, we base our work on the notion of identity information as a continuum.
As in everyday life, some situations online benefit simply from displaying individuals’ presence. In other situations
As mentioned, we employ the notion of levels of detail in rendering identity, with detail increasing as the viewer remains focused on the individual. Levels of detail maximize the system’s flexibility in terms of the screen space and attention it demands and allow the user to get a quick overview of a crowd or focus longer on particular individuals, supporting the social activity of people-

Figure 1: Identity information displayed at three increasing levels of detail, within a colored-dot chat system watching [7]. Relevant levels of representation range from just the individual’s face and name, to details such as occupation and interests, to heavier-weight full web pages and “online profiles”.
Our interaction design is useful in a variety of online environments. For example, chat systems can use it to better support crowds of users who otherwise might be completely undifferentiated in representation, strengthening the community’s sense of participants’ identity.
SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
We have implemented a prototype of our design in Java, using a chat system where participants are represented as colored circles as a backdrop. The system displays information about a participant when a user points at a circle. Initially only the participant’s face and name are displayed (Figure 1). Greater detail is shown if the pointer remains focused on the circle, which allows for both rapid overview of an online crowd and for focusing on a particular individual. After one second of focus, the rendering level switches to show a compact geek-code-like strings (“b+), in this case indicating avid reading, and a small picture of a basketball (Figure 2). After another two seconds of focus greater detail is shown, with the code string showing interest in books expanded into some of the individual’s favorite authors and the basketball into his favorite team, while a new piece of data, occupation, is added (Figure 3). One interesting feature of the system is the ability to randomly determine some of what is displayed each time an individual is focused on, which may encourage community members to continue exploring their social space, finding out about unknown facets of others’ personalities. Finally, after another ten seconds the level of detail increases again and the web page of the participant being focused on is opened on a frame next to the applet.
The system can be explored at the URL http://www.media.mit.edu/~royrod/projects/light_identity
FUTURE WORK
There are many interesting directions for future work in accessible representation of identity online. Beyond levelof-detail rendering, techniques in abstract representation and graphical data-hiding hold a lot of promise for displaying identity information embedded in images, which would allow even lighter-weight representation of identity than exists in our current system.
The online representation of identity can also greatly benefit from work in content description languages such as
XML. Such work could allow, given an individual’s web page, for automated generation of all aspects of online identity representation, from pictures to examples of sports or books the individual is interested in. This would remove the burden of generating and specifying identity information explicitly from the individual, who could simply build a web page as usual that could automatically be viewed at any level of detail, smoothly transitioning from a quick glance to as much information as the web page contains.
REFERENCES
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Judith S. Donath, Identity and Deception in the Virtual
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Communities in Cyberspace , Routledge, London http://judith.www.media.mit.edu/Judith/Identity/
2.
Judith S. Donath, Karrie Karahalios, Fernanda Viegas,
Visualizing Conversations , to appear in Proceedings of
HICSS-32, 1999, Maui, Hawaii
3.
Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ,
1959, New York: Doubleday
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5.
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Whyte, William H., City: Rediscovering the Center ,
1988, New York: Doubleday