Using rhythms of relationships to understand e‐mail archives

Adam Perer, Ben Shneiderman and Douglas W. Oard

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2006, vol. 57, issue 14, 1936-1948

Abstract: Due to e‐mail's ubiquitous nature, millions of users are intimate with the technology; however, most users are only familiar with managing their own e‐mail, which is an inherently different task from exploring an e‐mail archive. Historians and social scientists believe that e‐mail archives are important artifacts for understanding the individuals and communities they represent. To understand the conversations evidenced in an archive, context is needed. In this article, we present a new way to gain this necessary context: analyzing the temporal rhythms of social relationships. We provide methods for constructing meaningful rhythms from the e‐mail headers by identifying relationships and interpreting their attributes. With these visualization techniques, e‐mail archive explorers can uncover insights that may have been otherwise hidden in the archive. We apply our methods to an individual's 15‐year e‐mail archive, which consists of about 45,000 messages and over 4,000 relationships.

Date: 2006
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:57:y:2006:i:14:p:1936-1948

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