Using rhythms of relationships to understand e-mail archives

  • Authors:

  • Adam Perer;Ben Shneiderman;Douglas W. Oard

  • Affiliations:

  • Human–Computer Interaction Lab, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742;Human–Computer Interaction Lab, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742;Human–Computer Interaction Lab, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

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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. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.