Ipseology
using large datasets
and computational methods
Ipseology is the new study of identity. It is the investigation of ipseity: personal identity, selfhood and the essential elements of identity.
This website is Ipseology Central - a place to explore ipseology data, methods, visualizations and publications. It is maintained by Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones.
Quick Start
Ipseology and Personally Expressed Identity
I study personally expressed identity. I am building tools to do so at scale, globally, in real time.
Personally expressed identity is who or what an individual themselves says they are.
It is personal – the individual is describing themselves.
It is expressed – these are words the individual emits, where others might see them.
And it describes identity – the explicit purpose of the text is description of the author.
More definitions at the ipseology glossary.
I am Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones, and I use computational social science to study temporal trends in human identity with personally expressed identity data. To do so, I tokenize and tally online profile bios such as those on Twitter. My recent research article provides more detail.
You may have seen me pointing out that American Twitter users are adding political affiliations to their bios. Or pronoun-slash-lists. Or LGBTQ identifiers.
I sometimes blog about trends in personally expressed identity. I am currently developing an introductory book on ipseology.
You can explore trends like these using a tool I built: Jason Jeffrey Jones Identity Trends. It is a first step toward a multinational, multilingual, multiyear stream of identity trend data that is measured consistently and persistently.
I am also director of the Computational Social Science of Emerging Realities Group.