Ipseology

the study of human identity
using large datasets
and computational methods

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Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones

Creating and Giving Away for Free a 100,000 Observation Human Identity Dataset

Created:

Ipseity 100k

I will make a list of 100 words and then ask 10 people per day whether each word describes them. I will do this for 100 days. I will make a dataset of 100,000 observations freely available to everyone.

Why?

My name is Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones, and I am an ipseologist - that means I study the words individuals use to describe themselves.

I want more ipseologist friends. So, I built the tools Jason Jeffrey Jones Identity Trends and Human Identities across Nations of the Earth, Ngram Investigator (HINENI) to make it easy to see who calls themselves what, and to compare across time and geography.

Those tools are built from data within Twitter profile biographies. Some people don't like Twitter data, and - like it or not - it's no longer available. Thus, this current effort, in which I pay individuals directly to supply similar self-descriptive data.

More!

To keep up with progress on this project, subscribe to my once-weekly-or-less email newsletter. For data you can work with right now, check out the links on the page Who-am-I Data Freely and Publicly Available.

Updates

: Wrote and tested R, Python and shell scripts to compile the daily cumulative data file. It works! A new cumulative file will be uploaded daily to the OSF project at https://osf.io/2ndsf/. Look in the folder named ipseity-daily-data.

: Data update: About 380 respondents so far. In December 2024, about 92% of respondents endorsed happy. In January 2025, so far the rate is 88%. I wrote down plans for tables and visualizations to include in the dashboard.

: I checked in on the data. New respondents were recruited daily. More people said they were happy than sad.

: After quite a lot of wrestling with Qualtrics, the survey works as intended. I used the Social Science Dashboard Inator infrastructure to trigger daily surveys.

: I created the list of words the survey will sample from. There are 1000+ words. Each respondent will see 100 randomly chosen words. There will be 11 respondents per day. The "words" in my list include phrases and emojis.

: I named the project Ipseity 100K.

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