Email as spectroscopy: automated discovery of community structure within organizations

  • Authors:
  • Joshua R. Tyler;Dennis M. Wilkinson;Bernardo A. Huberman

  • Affiliations:
  • HP Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto CA;HP Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto CA;HP Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto CA

  • Venue:
  • Communities and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We describe a method for the automatic identification of communities of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a betweenness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. These studies are complemented by a qualitative evaluation of the results in the field.