Quantified Personality. Automatic Personality Analysis from Online and Mobile Usage Data (PDF)

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, , language: English, abstract: Algorithms are instructions for the stepwise execution of a method. Social and cultural scientists but tend to broaden the meaning of this notion and use it as an umbrella notion for digital automatization in general. But computer programs contain non-algorithmic command syntax, also. Furthermore, algorithms may develop and change during implementation and use which makes talking about "the" algorithm being always identical with itself often difficult or impossible. A comprehension of the notion of algorithm too distant from that of computer science hinders the comprehensibility of social and cultural scientific analyses by computer scientists. On the other hand, these sciences shouldn't confine their usage of this notion to that of the latter to be still able to deal with the phenomenon from a different perspective. (cf. Dourish 2016)

Automatic personality analysis doesn't use data gathered by questionnaires administered to respondents, any more, but uses usage data which are generated by default and in different contexts, respectively. This is the big novelty of this field of investigation which led to the two articles published by Kosinski and Stillwell in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" in 2013 and 2015 being the most influential articles ever published in the "Proceedings" according to their Altmetric Score. These two articles dealt with the analysis of the personality of Facebook users using their Facebook likes. [...]