my:ID is a web-based data visualization platform exploring the complexity of human identity. The project visualizes how people around me see and understand the basic American identity labels, and expresses how and why those labels are important to me. The platform is based on user-submitted data from 18 individuals, age 18 TO 19, transforming the spectrum of common identity terms into an accessible data visualisation.
This project started as my way to explain how I think about my identity and whole connection to people who made me who I am. As an Asian, non-straight woman who grew up half in the USA and half in Japan, it is very hard for my friends and family in Japan to understand my friends or me. Furthermore, it is very hard for me to understand why they can’t. This project has become a tool for me to explain how my friendships have influenced the way I see gender, sexuality, and identity, beyond normative labels.It has also helped me reconnect with many people, and talk with them about their identity.I am very interested in how technology, design, and society might capture human identity in different ways.
my:ID includes three work in process data visualization.
1. My connection to people in my life
2. Terminologies used to describe gender labels (by people from 1)
3. Terminologies used to describe sexuality labels (by people from 1)
This whole project started with one conversation I had in my internship. We were making recommendation system and looking for a way to personalize it. And someone said, “Let’s ask their gender. We can eliminate something by that”. I immediately said, “In this century, do we really wanna ask people’s gender and make a recommendation depending on that?” Then I just did some research into gender and data collection and found out that many approaches to data collection only offer users to 100% represent as few choices they provide, or they make a user type in input which goes through data processing where it gets sorted out again. People take surveys everyday with questions such as, “Are you male, female, or prefer not to answer?” That sorting out sometimes includes an API system that generates prediction of gender in either male or female by their first name. In other words, data collections are very binary.There are not many ways represent yourself according to a position on a spectrum.
In today’sworld, being LGBTQA+ means being a minority, but I really believe there will come a day when being LGBTQA+ will mean being just like everyone else. Still, when that time comes,, the struggle of finding and communicating your identity will continue.Stereotyping will continue.It will still be hard for many people to represent themselves in the form of data.
Even after undertaking this project, I admit that I have not fully captured the complexity of humans’ gender and sexual identity. In some ways, this ongoing struggle proves the urgency and relevance of this project. Human identity will always be an ongoing conversation, but it is an important conversation to continuing having. After struggling for a year, I have learned that the point is for me to struggle, and to continue struggling, and along the way to find a few ways that I can forgive myself and others for not being able to understand human gender and sexual identity from every angle at once. This project, however, has given me hope for a world in which others are able to peek into my perspective with the help of my friends and professors.