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Using rhythms of relationships to understand E-mail archives
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.
... Tyler and Tang (2003) investigate email rhythms and responsiveness of employees by conducting interviews and observations. Perer et al. (2006) analyze email archives. The latter two studies reveal a dyadic aspect of temporal rhythms, i.e. the rhythms are negotiated and aligned based on the communication partner. ...
... The academic participants work independently and exert control over their daily and weekly temporal structuring. Additionally, we analyzed the data of one of the authors of this paper to get a baseline understanding of how the data can be interpreted and what meaning can be extracted from the data (equivalent to Begole et al. 2002;Perer et al. 2006). For all participants email is the primary means of electronic communication. ...
... They perform their work during the week from Monday to Friday, with weekend work being the exception. This supports other studies that find clear start, end, and break times, with less activity on the weekend (Perer et al., 2006;Wang et al., 2012). Our findings suggest that the sample conforms to the dominant regular working hours of the developed countries of the United Nations (Anttila & Oinas, 2018;Backhaus et al., 2018;Beers, 2000;International Labour Organization, 2011;Wöhrmann et al., 2016), where work occurs between 7am and 7pm, with a lunch break and mostly 5 days a week. ...
In the past, work was governed by the natural rhythms of the physical world, but organizations increasingly distribute their work along the temporal dimension. This leads to varying temporal rhythms, which depict recurring patterns of activity in time, among workers, enabled by communication and collaboration technologies. The routine use of technology generates activity log data called digital traces, which promise an opportunity for a data-driven inquiry into temporal rhythms. While research using digital traces is scarce, various vendors claim to identify daily working hours based on email traces. Our study explores the use of email traces for an inquiry into daily and weekly temporal rhythms by triangulating quantitative results with interviews. Contrary to the vendors' claims, our results show that the usefulness of email traces is limited to identifying aggregated and stable temporal rhythms.
... Messages in "faMailiar" are presented in calendar-like manner [17]. Perer, Shneiderman and Oard developed a novel approach for understanding the individuals and communities from the email archive [18]. Rhythms of relationships were visualised in the project and have shown they could provide context that is necessary for social scientist [18]. ...
... Perer, Shneiderman and Oard developed a novel approach for understanding the individuals and communities from the email archive [18]. Rhythms of relationships were visualised in the project and have shown they could provide context that is necessary for social scientist [18]. In later work, Perer and Smith developed three email visualisation that capture the hierarchal, temporal and correlation patterns [19]. ...
With the increasing number of email messages and accounts, email clients have become cluttered and difficult to use. Therefore, more usable email clients that help users to browse email easily are needed. The revision of the related literature showed that email archives have been visualised for many purposes such as users' relationship, email messages relationship and tasks management. Nevertheless, learnability and usability of email visualisation have not been considered at present. Therefore, this paper describes an experiment that was performed in order to investigate whether information visualisation can improve the learnability of email clients. This was conducted by developing two email visualisations tools that were called LinearVis, MatrixVis. LinearVis is an email visualisation tool that presents email messages based on a dateline alongside senders' email addresses. It is a multi coordinated views visualisation tool enabling users to display email messages simultaneously with the recipients (TO, CC). MatrixVis is an email visualisation tool that visualises email messages based on a dateline and groups them into timeslots which present a full day. It is also comprised of multi coordinated views enabling users to explore all messages sent by an email user simultaneously with those received in selected date. Thirty users, who encountered the experimental tools for the first time, were required to perform five experimental tasks in the proposed email visualisations and a standard email client. In order to find out whether the learnability of email clients can be improved by visualising email archives, the effectiveness (i.e. tasks successful rate) and the efficiency (i.e. tasks accomplishment time) of LinearVis and MatrixVis were compared to the standard email client. Experimental results demonstrated that although users used the experimental tools for the first time, tasks completion rates in the proposed visualisations were gradually becoming better than the standard email. Also, tasks accomplishment time was gradually reduced in both email visualisations. Thus, the usability of email clients can significantly be improved by visualising email messages. Finally, this paper highlights some of the directions of future work.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Contemporary philanthropy relies on a gift/counter-gift process: a person making a donation receives benefits for it, mostly financial (tax deductions) or symbolic (recognition). Donor recognition is an important part of philanthropy and comes in many forms. One of them is donor plaques—on walls, signs, or objects/buildings—associated with naming, i.e., the material traces of recognition that have the name of the donor on them. The analysis of donor plaques deepens our understanding of the way the act of giving leaves traces. What are these traces of philanthropy? How long do donor plaques stay on the walls of institutions? How are they negotiated? How do they change the urban landscape at a bigger scale? This chapter aims at understanding the specificity and the symbolic role of donor plaques as traces left voluntarily by philanthropic donors. Focusing on an understudied topic (philanthropic traces) and based on two qualitative research conducted in philanthropic settings, it questions the relationship elite donors have with time and space through the analysis of a concrete object (the plaque). It also examines the meaning of these traces (and the values they convey), as well as the power relations (and resistances) they create.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
The growing masses of digital traces generated by the datafication process make the algorithms that manage them increasingly central to contemporary society.
There is widespread agreement in considering traces and algorithms as complex objects that intertwine social and material practices with their own cultural, historical, and institutional nature (Halford et al., 2010).
Accordingly, given this strong intertwining between the social world and the digital world that is formed by material and technological objects, it becomes possible to consider the algorithms and traces as socio-digital objects. For this reason, this article aims to identify the features that allow us to frame them as socio-digital objects starting from concepts borrowed from the actor-network theory (Latour and Woolgar 1879). In particular, we will first discuss opacity, authority and autonomy concepts and then see how those features emerge in digital geographical traces.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Visits to museums in the twenty-first century do not merely involve coming in contact with art but also living an interactive and relational experience that has changed the organization of museums, not only the exhibition rooms but also other museum spaces: boutiques, cafés, restaurants, and public areas. This new type of visit implies the role of an original agent: the frontalier visitor who, by inhabiting spaces adjacent to exhibition rooms, expands and reinforces the museum’s boundaries and the museum experience itself. This work is focused on visitors’ footprints as material and virtual marks and aims at showing the results of a field analysis carried out from 2017 to 2019 addressing the architecture of modern art museums. Fourteen museums have been analyzed, and four of them have been selected as the main objects of analysis: Malba, Moma, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou. We have studied their façades, esplanades, and entrance halls as spaces advancing what the public will experience inside the buildings. This analysis considers these adjacent spaces essential for the pass-through from the material experience to the virtual experience and from material footprints to virtual ones.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
In this chapter, I reflect on the relationship between shame and digital traces in cases of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) (I am thankful to Giovanni Zampieri, Dario Lucchesi and Massimo Cerulo for their invaluable help in writing and revising this chapter.). I will introduce the concept of shameful trace to describe records of diverse nature that can be used by a group of people participating in an effort to stigmatise an appearance, a conduct, an attitude or any other cause of social disapproval. Such a record is an object of shame only in a latent form. For it to become a shameful trace, it is necessary that it be shared and focussed on particular situations of moral condemnation.
This is neither a purely theoretical nor a purely empirical article. Rather, I first consider a case study of moral violence against a young Italian woman, Tiziana Cantone, who committed suicide in 2016 after the widespread non-consensual dissemination of intimate images. Further, I propose a theoretical understanding of the diffusion of shameful traces as a process of concerted social action including five elements: first, the ontology of the trace; second, the actors involved in its production and diffusion; third, the temporal and spatial coordinates of the shame diffusion and the technical or social means employed in it; and finally (fourth and fifth), the cultural and normative frameworks. Finally, I investigate how social bonds and sociotechnical and normative regulations favour the diffusion of shame in cases of IBSA.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
This chapter explores the traces that we voluntarily leave behind on social media platforms, dictated by the selection of what we want to show and what we want to hide and how this affects the perception of ourselves.
Nowadays, digital platforms have a huge impact on our lives, in re-shaping both our habits and our personal attitudes. Particularly on social media, both tangible and intangible aspects of our lives can be datafied , which in turn affect and shape our feelings and experiences.
In order to explore this dynamic, I interviewed a selected target group of young media professionals who are used to promoting themselves and their work on social media, through the so-called practice of self-branding .
From the qualitative analysis of 20 in-depth interviews, this chapter investigates traces derived from implicit self-branding practices , which can take the form of controlling what is not to be shared, measuring the online reactions, and hiding relevant information. All these non-activities are also strategic in building and managing the users’ online branded personas.
Thus, through the management of the visible and invisible traces on social media profiles, users convey a branded and polished version of themselves.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Why do users generally pay little attention to the serious threats to their privacy inherent in new communication technologies? In attempting to answer this question, I consider two different and complementary approaches to the issue of surveillance: the now classic view of Bauman and the more recent, but already well-known, view of Zuboff. I show how Bauman focuses mainly on subjective factors, represented by the psychic motivations of the user, and assigns little importance to technology, whereas technology as an objective factor plays a fundamental role in Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism.
Hence, I propose to broaden the theoretical framework in order to better capture the intertwining of subjective and objective factors, particularly by taking into account studies on the new philanthropy. On closer inspection, the fact that the new economy tycoons are also often committed to ostentatiously doing good for the less fortunate could explain users’ overconfidence. Since ordinary people see the alleged generosity of the owners of Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook widely publicized, it is reasonable for them to assume that these “modern-day heroes” are offering their services free of charge to all and sundry for the common good.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
In the United States, gentrification typically involves whites displacing African American, working-class communities. This work uses a political economy framework to better understand the clues displacement leaves behind. Specifically, this research investigates what happened to a former community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, known as Silver Hill, which was an enclave of mostly African American residents founded in the late nineteenth century just west of the city. Through archival research and investigation of the remaining traces of the neighborhood, we develop a theory of spatial erasure that highlights how wealthy white communities that grew up around Silver Hill subsumed and eradicated it. Specifically, racial capitalism played a major role in the abuse and neglect of Silver Hill. The neighborhood became surrounded by wealthy white developments which cut off road access to their homes. Today, a cemetery, two houses, and a litany of historical records offer clues about what was once a thriving African American community. Additionally, descendants of the neighborhood’s residents provide key information about its life and death. We discuss the implications of examining this history, especially as it pertains to the collective remembrance of Silver Hill.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
This chapter deals with the analysis of Julian Assange as a public figure through the use of three perspective angles. In the first part, Assange’ history is briefly outlined, tracing it back to the systems of thought of authors such as Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, with the aim of highlighting how the Australian journalist’s biography helps to illuminate his (and our) historical time and, vice versa, how historical time helps to depict his biography and his courageous journalistic campaigns more precisely. The second part shows how the apparently subversive aspects of Assange’s activity in fact need to be analysed within the web of social control and the subsequent fight between rulers and outsiders. The criminalisation of Julian Assange is, by this token, a consequence of the reaction enacted by power against militant practice aimed at claiming an alternative use of the web. The third paragraph examines three basic principles of Enlightenment which are apparent in the WikiLeaks approach and explicitly recalled by Assange: the connection between the duty to improve knowledge and the right to communicate, publicity as a test to reveal injustice and the understanding of freedom of the press as an antitotalitarian device.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Understanding social practices as they co-evolve between researcher-community is fundamental in “design and social innovation” where local knowledge, resources, and agency meet to solve wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169, 1973). In this chapter, we seek to explore the traces that researchers and community members leave behind as indexical forms of representation. Contemporary perspectives urge a critical examination of the interplay between design and broader structural and cultural issues (Björgvinsson et al., CoDesign, 8(2–3), 127–144, 2012). Design methods, however, are often chosen arbitrarily reflecting a “toolbox” mentality that potentially misses culturally embedded nuances (Dourish, Implications for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 541–550), 2006). Cultural probes as part of this “toolbox” are often associated with ethnographic methods, yet were never intended to generate data, whereas ethnography goes beyond data gathering to analyze socio-cultural meaning and practices (Boehner et al., How HCI interprets the probes. In CHI Proceedings Designing for Specific Cultures, 2007). We present two case studies to discuss the use of cultural probes in participatory design as enablers of dialogue in open-ended conversations with communities. We draw on reflexive practices and Manzini’s concept of “diffuse design” and “expert design.” Working in communities can thus become a form of “public ethnography,” an effort to understand and analyze social practices from multiple knowledge perspectives as an ongoing process.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
The concept of trace is useful for a semiotic reflection upon what is left behind. Similar to the concepts of index and footprint, traces are traditionally described as already signs, or more precisely as something recognized as a sign (Violi, Riv Ital Filos Linguaggio, 2016, http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/view/365 ; Mazzucchelli, Riv Ital Filos Linguaggio, 2015, http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/view/312 ). This act of recognition is fundamentally dependent on a community’s work of interpretation, in order to actualize a potential narration lying in the trace, but what if the promised sense is not grasped? Adopting the notion of intentionality (Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Hachette, Paris, 1979) to include partially unconscious traces within the sphere of semiotic investigation, the article considers the possibility to conceive traces as paradoxical signs standing for nothing, i.e., signs of insignificance (Leone, On insignificance. The loss of meaning in the post-material age. Routledge, 2020). Through the analysis of digital traces and trolling, (in)significance is disputed on the basis of a proposed paradigm, within which even such seemingly accidental traces may possess profound significance within a digital network constructed of distributed subjectivity. One conclusion drawn from the example is that strong normative claims about what may qualify as significant often conceal an ideologically charged agenda. For this reason in particular, a detailed account of digital traces should be the highest priority of semiotics today.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Physical daily contexts are replete with traces of the past. A statue in a park, the name of a street, or an old advertisement can all remind people of specific historical moments or periods. Often, they recall glorious episodes, but traces of less glorious pasts also persist. Among them, the most self-censored ones refer to past immoral actions that tarnish the overly idealized moral standard attributed to the group. As a case in point, material traces of the colonial past became the focus of controversies within formerly colonizing countries during the last decade. European anti-racist movements questioned the colonial heritage of European societies in an unprecedented manner and active social minorities also brought to the fore some traces still in the background of physical environments. Part of public opinion reacted by denouncing the “cancel culture” or the danger of “erasing” history. This chapter outlines a social psychological approach about contemporary perceptions and interpretations of still self-censored material traces of Italian colonialism. Results of a qualitative survey on Italian participants’ representations and attitudes toward a candy with a colonial wrapping will illustrate how Italian participants of different generations question this ephemeral trace and take on the challenge of a cumbersome past.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
This introduction chapter provides context and background to the concept of trace in social sciences, also presenting an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this volume. Information that was not meant to be informative and evidence that did not expect to possess evidential character, traces are construed as evidence only from the vantage point of the observer, inadvertently left behind by those who produced the trace in the first place (indeed, awareness might change footprints and make them fade out). Conceived as clues rather than statements, traces prove to be useful for studying current social facts and individuals who have not yet vanished. This holds to be true especially in our contemporary platform society, due to its datafication processes and the ensuing quantification of features never quantified before; digital footprints determine the selection of the most relevant content or services to offer, creating accordingly personalized feedback. Thus, individual and collective online behavior leading to traces production is shaped by digital environments’ affordances and constraints; at the same time, such socio-technically situated traces retroact over digital systems (by fueling algorithms and predictive models), thus reinforcing, or questioning, the power relations at stake. Conclusively, a brief remark is made on future research possibilities associated with the sociology of traces.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Individuals and groups leave evidence of their lives when they are engaged in their activities. In this way, they create a rich amount of material that tells us about their behaviours, opinions and values. This material is not created for research purposes and is different from that solicited by researchers. In recent decades, the spread of new communication technologies has amplified the possibility of creating and disseminating this kind of data outside the research context.
In this chapter, what people leave behind (WPLB) online is studied from a strictly methodological point of view. What kind of evidence are researchers dealing with? Is it possible to reconnect it with the traditional methodological framework? We suggest that data left behind by people and groups on the Internet should be divided into three different categories: online found data ( digital traces ), online retrieved data ( web-mediated documents ) and online captured data ( online behaviours ). The phase of contextualization proves essential in understanding the very nature of (online) data.
This work leads to rediscovering the potential of classical methodological tools such as simple observation, documentary analysis and trace analysis. These practices provide methodological value to research projects that analyse WPLB in physical and web-mediated environments.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
From the study of semiotic paradigms in relation to the face, we focus on the traces, understanding how some flourish from the tangible but ignored signs left by humans daily, while others are totally imbricated in the face from/in which they transpire.
We typologize them in three varieties, from their multidimensional configuration, offering case studies of emanation, imbrication, and cancellation. First, between art and forensic tendencies, Dewey-Hagborg uses hair, cigarettes, and chewing gum off the streets to program and build 3D faces through the DNA found in them. Secondly, we examine the artistic work of Jorit who engraves on his face the sign that symbolizes belonging to a tribe he is working with. Name-face isomorphism emerges in the third case: Janez Janša carries out a performative sociopolitical program to test, destabilize, and reorganize cultural complexity.
All offer a syncretic situation analyzable by means of the semiotic approach and bioanthropological resources. The divergent weights of similar elements make us reflect on the relationship between the innermost meanings of our faces and their tracks in a sort of anticlockwise movement but also on the convergence between macro-cultural and techno-political orientations with intimate and located magnitude.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
In the digital era, there is an increasing number of areas where the footprints we leave behind (voluntarily or not) become relevant for the use (legitimate or not) that can be made of them, creating new broad scenarios of analysis in different fields of interest. These developments have affected a wide range of scientific fields, and social sciences have also been called upon to face major challenges from an epistemological, theoretical and methodological standpoint. In this regard, the use of research tools, such as social network analysis and sentiment analysis , poses many questions to the researcher regarding their robustness, also in comparison to traditional research methods and techniques, i.e. the two-step flow communication model . This paper will propose a theoretical and methodological comparison between the Katz-Lazarsdeldian tradition of the notion of personal influence and the one of influencer logic that is central in digital methods . Starting from this evaluation, the question is whether what is happening in the field of the analysis of the big data provided by the spread of the digital footprint is capable of adding some new element to what has already been highlighted by the “two-step communication theory”, or whether it simply represents its explication.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is meant to provide individuals with an actual representation of their personal identity by obtaining the erasure of their past “digital traces” left online. In 2014, the CJEU’s leading case Google Spain accorded the data subject the right to obtain the de-referencing of personal information related to past events from search engines. Consequently, the RTBF has been included in the title of Article 17 GDPR as a synonym of the right to erasure, without however being explicitly explained or regulated. Alongside this process, the ECtHR has constantly highlighted the need for fair balancing between the right to respect for private life and the right to freedom of expression, often denying the applicants the right to obtain removal or anonymization of news reports published in the past because of their permanent public interest. By stressing that Internet archives constitute an important source for education and historical research, it admitted, though, that the obligations of search engines may differ from those of the original publishers of the information. This reasoning, however, does not seem to have influenced a recent decision of the Italian Corte di Cassazione , commented in the final part of this chapter.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
Starting from the commonly used meaning of a “human” footprint, connected to the traces that every action, product or process leaves in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, the paper explores new perspectives for a changing social theory considering the principles of sustainability. This theoretical hypothesis stands on the necessity of a revision of the sociological principles to observe and analyse the contemporary phenomena connected to economic, political and social transformations due to environmental problems. The focus is on human action and its new role in the changing social space, time and relations. The application of these revised notions to a concrete process, such as the assessment of policies and social participation in Italian National Parks, according to the “positive thinking” model, will add some evidence about the radical transformation of cognitive paths and social dynamics.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
The expanding use of algorithms in society has called for the emergence of “critical algorithm studies” across several fields, ranging from media studies to geography and from sociology to the humanities. In the past 5 years, a consistent literature on the subject has developed. Inspired by these studies, we explored the ways digital traces may be employed for auditing algorithms and find evidence about algorithmic functioning. We focus on the analysis of digital traces through search engines and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present four cases of how digital traces may be used for auditing algorithms and testing their quality in terms of data, model, and outcomes. The first example is taken from Noble’s (2018) book Algorithms of Oppression . The other three examples are very recent, two of them related to COVID-19 pandemic and about the most controversial type of algorithms: image recognition. Search as research and the analysis of digital traces and footprints within quasi-experimental research designs are useful methods for testing the quality of data, the codes, and the outcomes of algorithms.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
In this chapter, we focus on how virtual communities (VCs) leave “traces” or “unintentional information” and study how they can affect VCs and their features. In doing so, we use qualitative data from a doctoral research project developed between Italy and Belgium. Firstly, in this introduction, we briefly describe how “traces” are considered. Secondly, we unpack the concepts “VC” and “sense of community.” Thirdly, we explore the context in which VCs take place Theoretically. Fourthly, we explain the methodology used and the case selection procedure. Then, we describe our results, and finally, the chapter ends with a discussion and a conclusion. We consider the notion “traces” in Bloch’s terms (1992: 51) and use the interpretation given by Ricoeur; traces are “documents in archives (which) for the most part come from witnesses in spite of themselves” (2009: 171); “The trace is thus the higher concept under whose aegis Bloch places testimony. It constitutes the operator par excellence of ‘indirect’ knowledge” (170). Information disseminated by social media users, considered as unconscious “tracks,” can be used by others in different ways than the original intent, thus acquiring a different meaning. In this chapter, our first research question polls for the features of information that are left unintentionally by the users of virtual communities (RQ1). Our second research question focuses on the role that such unintentional information has in virtual communities (RQ2) or, in other words, on how users of VCs appropriate and apply these traces in different ways than originally intended.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
This chapter continues the recent debate on the epistemological dimension of traces and tracing. Following our own preliminary work and in confrontation with an explicitly non-Western epistemology—namely, the case of “First Australians”—the chapter proposes the perspective of interpretive tracing. It calls for the systematic reflection of practices and underlying epistemologies of traces as objects of interpretation in a cross-cultural, i.e., cosmopolitan, perspective. It is a perspective that is sensitive to the tacit assumptions of objectivity and linear inferencing that underlie many Western approaches. Further, it is an open perspective that is sensitive to various embedded notions of time and temporality (not just time as a linear approach to the world) in particular. Furthermore, this perspective we advocate can eventually show that trace and tracing entail different social, cultural, and societal notions of social binding.
... We can illustrate these concepts using the example of email, a widespread form of online communication that can be analysed by researchers to gather information about contemporary societies (for a review, see Perer et al., 2006). Whenever email messages are sent, evidence of the activities carried out by individuals and groups is left behind. ...
This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science.
This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.
... However, digital traces also occur as "little data" (Galliers et al. 2017, p. 185) that produce relevant insights and focus on a few individuals with a high number of observations. For example, "… 13,062 sent emails over 2.5 years" from five individuals , or data from a single individual with 44,971 observations (Perer et al. 2006). Beyond the size in terms of number of observations and participants, I distinguish the data granularity by breadth ("number of measureable properties") and depth ("level of aggregation within each property") (Hüllmann 2019). ...
Headlines about excessive data collection and algorithms that make decisions about
people’s lives are common. Insurance companies want access to health data1, elections
are influenced by targeted advertisements (Persily 2017), and algorithms decide who
receives medical attention in COVID-19 triage2. Data, tracking, and algorithms are
everywhere. Algorithmic management concerns business, politics, and society alike—
every single citizen is affected. We are now living in a world where everyday life is
increasingly digitised, and citizens’ behaviours are tracked, stored, and analysed for
profit. The ongoing controversies surrounding data tracking and analysis emphasise the
need to explore the societal implications of algorithmic management. The emergence of
new technologies and technological approaches, in particular, advances in computing
power and data analysis, storage, and sharing, enable the rise of the “algorithmification.”
This thesis addresses the algorithmification of the workplace, focusing on opportunities
and challenges of algorithmic management at work, and digital traces research on work.
When are the two activities appropriate? How can algorithmic management and digital
trace research be implemented effectively, in terms of validity and meaningfulness? I
contribute insights on these two questions, arguing that they espouse a duality and affect
each other, resulting in a need to balance validity, appropriateness, and meaningfulness.
... Fisher & Dourish (2004) examine email trace data to identify recurring temporal patterns. Others extract, visualize and cluster temporal rhythms of email usage (Perer, Shneiderman, & Oard, 2006;Viégas, Boyd, Nguyen, Potter, & Donath, 2004). I was unable to identify studies on collective media choice based on digital traces. ...
... Conversation Map [40] employs a node-link diagram to present social connections in the context of very large-scale conversations in email messages. Perer et al. [37] showed rhythms of relationships using line charts. Revealing interaction and collaboration patterns among team members is one focus of T-Cal. ...
Understanding team communication and collaboration patterns is critical for improving work efficiency in organizations. This paper presents an interactive visualization system, T-Cal, that supports the analysis of conversation data from modern team messaging platforms (e.g., Slack). T-Cal employs a user-familiar visual interface, a calendar, to enable seamless multi-scale browsing of data from different perspectives. T-Cal also incorporates a number of analytical techniques for disentangling interleaving conversations, extracting keywords, and estimating sentiment. The design of T-Cal is based on an iterative user-centered design process including interview studies, requirements gathering, initial prototypes demonstration, and evaluation with domain users. The resulting two case studies indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of T-Cal in real-world applications, including daily conversations within an industry research lab and student group chats in a MOOC.
... Today's narrative around systems research in communication tools focuses on enhancing users' personal information management techniques. This framing highlights email overload [15,33], email-based tasks [6,22], and mining communication patterns [17,27]. Instead, tools might make us better communicators. ...
Email has scaled our ability to communicate with large groups, but has not equivalently scaled our ability to listen and respond. For example, emailing many people for feedback requires either impersonal surveys or manual effort to hold many similar conversations. To scale personalized conversations, we introduce techniques that exploit similarities across conversations to recycle relevant parts of previous conversations. These techniques reduce the authoring burden, save senders' time, and maintain recipient engagement through personalized responses. We introduce MyriadHub, a mail client where users start conversations and then crowd workers extract underlying conversational patterns and rules to accelerate responses to future similar emails. In a within-subjects experiment comparing MyriadHub to existing mass email techniques, senders spent significantly less time planning events with MyriadHub. In a second experiment comparing MyriadHub to a standard email survey, MyriadHub doubled the recipients' response rate and tripled the number of words in their responses.
... Users can select emails using filters over attributes to observe patterns. Visualizing patterns of correspondence through temporal rhythms to understand relationships with contacts has been proposed in [7]. However, in both of these, the actual content of emails is not analysed. ...
This paper presents a novel interactive visualization technique that helps in gathering insights from large volumes of text generated through dyadic communications. The emphasis is specifically on showing content evolution and modification with passage of time. The challenge lies in presenting not only the content as a stand-alone but also understand how the present is related to the past. For example analyzing large volumes of emails can show how communication among a set of people have progressed or evolved over time, may be along with the roles of the communicators. It can also show how the content has changed or evolved. In order to depict the changes, the email repositories are first clustered using a novel algorithm. The clusters are further time-stamped and correlated. User-insights are provided through visualization of these clusters. Results of implementation over two different datasets are presented.
... • Another email collection that could be used is Shneiderman's collection. That collection includes about 45,000 emails that were intentionally retained between 1984 and 1998 by Professor Ben Shneiderman at University of Maryland [74]. Some advantages of using that collection could be: -It is a personal collection, where one communicating entity is common in all emails (i.e., a snapshot of one mailbox.) ...
... Amerika Birleşik Devletleri Milli Arşivleri e-postaları resmi kayıtlar olarak arşivlemektedir (Baron, 1999). E-posta arşivleri şüphesiz tarihçiler ve sosyal bilimcilere, bu belgeleri üreten kişi ve kuruluşları anlamaları için çok değerli bir içerik sağlamaktadır (Perer, Shneiderman ve Oard, 2006, s. 1936 (Herring, 2002). ...
... Similarly, a visualization from EmailViz showed "rhythm of a relationship" (2005) or how email activity with each contact changes over time. Several graphs were used to visualize a start of an active relationship, rhythm (intensity) of conversations and how it eventually dies away [115]. Mailview (2005) also plotted emails in a chronologically based visualization which enabled users to analyse and observe conversations' trends over time and perceive emails with similar features in a filtering and zoomable interface [57]. ...
Personal Information Management (PIM) is a study on how people acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, archive and discard information for various reasons and needs in physical and digital worlds. Many PIM tools are available for managing information on our desktop computers. And many research prototypes tried to augment or replace them. The development of these tools was based on the knowledge drawn form the field of psychology, human computer interaction, information retrieval and the research in the PIM field. Different metaphors and ways of organizing were introduced. However, little has been transferred to mainstream products. Most of these these prototypes were not extensively tested but results of the most looked prominent. This paper a classification of PIM research prototypes, solved issues, what has been developed and learnt, what has been transferred in mainstream applications and a quick look in to the future on where the development and research prototypes might be heading. This paper provides an early classification and is a basis for another in depth analysis of supported means and trends in PIM prototypes research (based on PIM activities -see later publications on http://pim.famnit.upr.si/blog/). A lot of text from this paper is left out in the new version. Espe-cially the analysis of what have been transferred to available software for consumers. Hence a technical report as this could prove of use for other researchers.
This paper examines how privacy measures, such as anonymisation and aggregation processes for email collections, can affect the perceived usefulness of email visualisations for research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The work is intended to inform archivists and data managers who are faced with the challenge of accessioning and reviewing increasingly sizeable and complex personal digital collections. The research in this paper provides a focused user study to investigate the usefulness of data visualisation as a mediator between privacy-aware management of data and maximisation of research value of data. The research is carried out with researchers and archivists with vested interest in using, making sense of, and/or archiving the data to derive meaningful results. Participants tend to perceive email visualisations as useful, with an average rating of 4.281 (out of 7) for all the visualisations in the study, with above average ratings for mountain graphs and word trees. The study shows that while participants voice a strong desire for information identifying individuals in email data, they perceive visualisations as almost equally useful for their research and/or work when aggregation is employed in addition to anonymisation.
Emails, much like communicative genres such as letters that predate them, are a rich source of data for researchers, but they are replete with privacy considerations. This paper explores the resulting friction between privacy concerns and email data access. Studies of email can often be centred on understanding patterns of behaviour and/or relationships between people or groups, and, as such, embody risks of disclosing private information. This is further amplified in humanities research which is concerned with the individual, their work and the circumstances that influence them. Furthermore, previous studies have expounded upon the benefits of visualisations for researching email data, a method which has been reported both as a path to addressing known concerns, as well as, introducing new concerns in privacy. The spectrum of methodologies leave archivists and curators of email data in a quandary, unable to balance accessibility with privacy. The research presented in this paper contributes a systematic approach to examining the relationship between email visualisation research and privacy. It presents a categorisation of email visualisation attributes, and a graded scale of privacy, to be used in conjunction as a framework for interrogating existing research and their associated email collections. The paper aims to instigate the first steps in concretely situating the extent to which research can take advantage of or is challenged by privacy conscious data management.
E-mail has a wealth of information, including work topics, interactions between people, and the evolution of events over time. The emails will give users a better understanding that how things have changed and evolved in the past. Much of the effort to visualize email has focused on three areas of email archiving: exploring the relationship between email volumes, mining the evolution of topics and events in emails, or the relationship of email owners to their counterparts. But there are currently fewer systems for analyzing their background stories through mail dataset. In this paper, we present the Mail event, which is an email visualization system. Its main purpose is to help users analyze the main information in the mail data set, such as keywords, topics, and event contents of the mail. Firstly, it helps users understand the keywords and themes of the mail through a variety of different attempts. Secondly, the way the email is matched into an event allows the user to understand the story of the email corresponding to the email at a certain point in time so that users can deeply understand the story behind the email. In this system, through rich visual elements, users can understand the e-mail dataset and have a further understanding of the development of events and their anomalies, so as to better coordinate or improve future work. Finally, the effectiveness of the system is verified by case studies and user evaluation experiments.
The integration of email into everyday life makes email networks the most accessible, and in many cases most accurate, source of data for mapping actual social and work relationships. Analyzing organizational email networks and email lists can provide a wealth of social information that can inform important decisions and support novel interventions. Organizations can identify unique social roles, individuals who span the gaps between organizational silos, internal influencers, and employees in the need of creating more connections. Although an analysis of email collections poses some risks, social network analysis can be less intrusive than many other methods for understanding social interaction. This chapter focuses on personal and organizational email collections, and discusses preparing, cleaning, and importing email data in NodeXL for social network analysis. Furthermore, the chapter presents two projects that serve as examples of how to analyze personal email collections.
This article surveys the literature on financial records and finds that very little has been written on the subject. Noting that as much as twenty years ago the Association of Canadian Archivists called for course content that would increase archivists' awareness of these records, the author calls for research into financial records and the records of financial institutions. The article describes how the newly formed UBC Centre for the Investigation of Financial Electronic Records (CiFER) aims to conduct research on financial records and the records of financial institutions. The article argues that new studies on financial records and the records of financial institutions will both better prepare archivists to preserve these types of records and provide opportunities to test and explore archival theory, as well as provide greater insight into the factors leading to economic stability and the stability of financial institutions, showing how archival studies can make practical and very relevant contributions to society. The article discusses a number of CiFER's research initiatives and how these will contribute to filling knowledge gaps and testing theory. The paper concludes with an invitation to interested archivists to become involved in the CiFER research network.
Today, as digital information storage, access and retrieval technologies are becoming the expected norm, there is a wealth of research literature appearing about such technologies and the role of archives and archivists in helping researchers find and use historic materials they need. Archivists and historians are necessarily research partners. This bibliography of 212 articles addresses the intersection of archives and digital technologies. Drawing from a set of international locations, the resources address issues of theory, policy, preservation, standards, access and technology, creating a rich collection of resources for those interesting in understanding and using archival materials.
Users with anomalous behaviors in online communication systems (e.g. email and social medial platforms) are potential threats to society. Automated anomaly detection based on advanced machine learning techniques has been developed to combat this issue; challenges remain, though, due to the difficulty of obtaining proper ground truth for model training and evaluation. Therefore, substantial human judgment on the automated analysis results is often required to better adjust the performance of anomaly detection. Unfortunately, techniques that allow users to understand the analysis results more efficiently, to make a confident judgment about anomalies, and to explore data in their context, are still lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel visual analysis system, TargetVue, which detects anomalous users via an unsupervised learning model and visualizes the behaviors of suspicious users in behavior-rich context through novel visualization designs and multiple coordinated contextual views. Particularly, TargetVue incorporates three new ego-centric glyphs to visually summarize a user's behaviors which effectively present the user's communication activities, features, and social interactions. An efficient layout method is proposed to place these glyphs on a triangle grid, which captures similarities among users and facilitates comparisons of behaviors of different users. We demonstrate the power of TargetVue through its application in a social bot detection challenge using Twitter data, a case study based on email records, and an interview with expert users. Our evaluation shows that TargetVue is beneficial to the detection of users with anomalous communication behaviors.
As mediated communication becomes an increasingly central part of everyday life, people have started going online to conduct business, to get emotional support, to find communities of interest, and to look for potential romantic partners. Most of these social activities take place primarily through the exchange of conversational texts that, over time, accrue into vast archives. As valuable as these collections of documents may be for our comprehension of the online social world, they are usually cumbersome, impenetrable records of the past. This thesis posits that history visualization- the visualization of people's past presence and activities in mediated environments- helps users make better sense of the online social spaces they inhabit and the relationships they maintain. Here, a progressive series of experimental visualizations explores different ways in which history may enhance social legibility. The projects visualize the history of people's activities in four different environments: a graphical chat room, a wiki site, Usenet newsgroups, and email. History and the persistent nature of online communication are the common threads connecting these projects. Evaluation of these tools shows that history visualizations can be utilized in a variety of ways, ranging from aids for quicker impression formation and mirrors for self-reflection, to catalysts for storytelling and artifacts for posterity.
E-discovery refers generally to the process by which one party (for example, the plaintiff) is entitled to "discover" evidence in the form of "electronically stored information" that is held by another party (for example, the defendant), and that is relevant to some matter that is the subject of civil litigation (that is, what is commonly called a "lawsuit"). This survey describes the emergence of the field, identifies the information retrieval issues that arise, reviews the work to date on this topic, and summarizes major open issues.
Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of how people acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve,
archive and discard information for various reasons in physical and digital worlds. Many PIM tools are available for managing
information on our desktop computers while many research prototypes have tried to augment or replace them. The development
of these tools was based on knowledge drawn from the fields of psychology, human–computer interaction, information retrieval,
knowledge management and research in the PIM field. Different metaphors and ways of organizing were introduced. However, the
prevailing beliefs are that most of these prototypes were not extensively tested and that the radical design (not addressing
real-world issues) and quick abandonment of prototypes prevented transfer to mainstream products. This paper looks at what
has been developed and learnt, what has been transferred to mainstream applications, discusses the possible reasons behind
these trends and challenges some parts of the above-mentioned beliefs.
Digital preservation involves active and continuous processes. Our approaches to digital preservation are becoming more robust as we make the transition from scoping the domain to conducting research to address the challenges posed by ensuring the long term accessibility of digital materials. Key to advancing digital preservation is the development of experimental environments to ensure the consistency and repeatability of digital preservation research.
Repositories are emerging as primary mechanisms for ensuring the longterm accessibility of digital materials; these mechanisms pose risks. How we access, understand, and manage these risks (e.g. DRAMBORA) has recieved an increasing amount of attention as a central aspect of the preservation process. The increasing scale at which we are producing digital materials and the diversity of approaches to representations of information make the identification, selection, and appraisal of these materials increasingly complex and difficult. Building on recent research and development funded by the European Union, this paper looks at issues surrouding digital preservation policies and practices and suggests ways that automation, experimentation and performance measurement provide approaches to improved practices and methods for instantiating these mechanisms in policies.
Online communication is an indispensable tool for communication and management. The network structure of communication is considered to affect team and individual performances, but it has not been not empirically tested. In this article, we collected a set of 1-month e-mail logs of a company and conducted an e-mail network analysis. We calculated the network centralities of 72 managerial candidates, and investigated the relationship between positions in the network and leadership performance with partial least squares structural equation modeling. Betweenness and in-degree network centralities of those middle managers are correlated with their leadership performance; on the other hand, for this management group, out-degree has no correlation, and PageRank is a negative indicator of leadership. Leaders with high performance are trusted in their communities as a hub of the information channel of the communication network.
Email archives contain rich information about how we interact with different contacts and how events evolve throughout time. Making sense of the archived messages can be a good way to understand how things evolved and progressed in the past. Although much work has been devoted to email visualization, most work has focused on presenting one of the two aspects of email archives: discovering the evolution of emails and events, or the relationship between the email owner and his/her contacts over time. In this paper, we present Email Map, an email visualization which integrates the information of both events and contacts into a single view, enabling users to make sense of their email archives with complementary contextual information. Two visualization components are designed to portray complex information within the email archives: event flow and contact tracks. The event flow illustrates the evolution of past events, helping the users to grasp high-level pictures and patterns of their email archives. The contact tracks reveal the interaction between the email owner and his/her contacts.
People nowadays struggle with huge unstructured collections containing some important knowledge. Search engines were developed to allow an easy access to relevant information, however they themselves produce for many queries large (un- structured) result sets. We suggest to tackle this problem by structuring these result lists or even complete collections in a personalized way, i.e. as the user would have structured it. To achieve this goal, we propose to use information about structuring behavior available from, e.g, an existing book- mark or folder hierarchy of the user. Besides structuring, the final visualization should also dependent on the user's pref- erences. Furthermore, we work on performance measures, which take the effect of the personalization into account to reduce the need for user studies.
ABSTRACT Inthis paper we describe ,difficulties involved in studying PIM behaviors ,and factors that can affect how ,people approach,the refinding process. Factors that have been studied in the context of information,seeking behaviors are summarized,and their application to PIM and refinding are discussed. Finally, we note the importance of task in evaluating information refinding and reuse behaviors and discuss several task taxonomies ,that have been proposed that have applicability to the evaluation of PIM.
TaskTracer is a research project at Oregon State University to identify innovative technological solutions to information overload and task management at the personal and workgroup levels. The core TaskTracer hypothesis is that people naturally want to organize their information, regardless of data type or storage location, into units that they think of as projects or activities or tasks. By building software that is aware of those tasks, we can greatly decrease costs, errors, and frustration. We believe that a database of past user actions on the desktop, segmented by user task, can enable substantial productivity- enhancing features when combined with machine learning. In our research, we are working to demonstrate that our system can help people find their task-related information faster, recover faster and better from interruptions, and maintain better awareness of personal and workgroup tasks. We have taken a very practical approach, building fully-functional prototypes and deploying them in the wild. Our current research is focused on several aspects: designing improved machine learning techniques to support automatic labeling of events; identifying machine learning techniques in intelligent user interfaces that balance automatic assistance and usability, building innovative interfaces to leverage our activity data, and measuring the impact of such innovative interfaces on reducing costs, errors, and frustration.
Email is an important part of our lives, almost everyone has at least one email account. It is not uncommon for an average professional email user to receive/send over a hundred emails a day. With all these personal and professional messages accumulated over time, email becomes our personal archive. In recently years, many interesting techniques are developed to improve email management, visualize mailbox content, explore historical events, and discover hidden knowledge from these electronic archives. In this paper, we propose an approach to visualize and compare email archives with Streamgraphs and Tag Clouds. Our preliminary results demonstrate the capability of this technique to compare any general text corpora with temporal information.
In this paper linguists and researchers of visual data analysis outline the requirements and benefits of an information visualization approach for corpus linguistics. Over the years, the information visualization community has come up with a number of methods to visualize text, but the majority of these techniques do not serve the needs of the linguistic community. This is evident in the over-simplification of the linguistic problems and generally caused by a poor understanding of the domain. We started a joint research effort with linguists, data miners, and information visualizers to design and produce better data analysis tools for corpus linguistics. This work is still in its early stages, but we have a shared vision of what needs to be done.
The email archives that people accumulate are a dense, complex, and highly personal record of their past interactions. As email becomes increasingly ubiquitous, these include not only their work interactions, but also their relationships with family members, friends, doctors, teachers, etc. However, current mail clients do little to support these archives beyond providing a basic filing and searching system: the interface to this very social environment renders it cold and impersonal. The problem we are addressing in this paper is how to transform this interface into a sociable space; a place where one feels surrounded by friends, conversations, and memories. In the first section of the paper we establish the need for visualizing and interacting with email archives. We start by looking at email archive use today - how they are used, the problems that exist. In the second section we then look at what information exists within an email archive, and what part of it is amenable to computational analysis. We also look at the information that is contributed by the user and discuss alternatives to filing that would allow the user to organize email in a more intuitive and informative way. In the third section we describe and critique a series of existing prototypes, discussing the social patterns that are embedded in email, such as the rhythm of interactions, the flow of relationships and the social networks that connect individuals, and examine the significance of making these perceivable. In the fourth section we explore the metaphor of email as habitat: if email is a virtual home, how can it help its inhabitant thrive? Here, we look at how personal beliefs and histories are reified by objects in the real world and at how this can be accomplished with email visualizations in the virtual world; we examine the role of display in establishing social role and in creating personal narratives; we discuss how email visualizations can function as both a private record and public display. 1 Why visualize email archives? Email has become a habitat(8): it is one's virtual home away from home. People check email all day, from work, from home, and on the road. It is used to set up appointments, discuss politics, and begin romances. Although it can be used to send to-do items to oneself, etc., email is primarily social: it is a communication medium for connecting people. A great deal of social information exists within one's personal email archives, though little of it is perceivable though the interfaces of today's email clients. Hidden among its cc's and bcc's is a depiction of one's social network, big changes is one's contacts demarcate moves to new jobs and new cities, and varying linguistic features and exchange rhythms create a portrait of one's acquaintances and their relationships.
As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users' pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.
Email is one oftl~ most successful computer applicmiom yet devised. Our empin~:al ct~ta show however, that althongh email was origiraUy designed as a c~nmunica/ons application, it is now used for ~tional funaions, that it was not designed for, such as tab management and persona/ afoOt/v/rig. We call this ernt~l oveHoad We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information manageaa,cnt: users eden have cluttered inboxes cor~mining hundreds of n~:age~¢, incl~rling outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads. Furthermore,, user attemt:Xs to rationalise their inbox~ by ~ing are ~Ron unsuccessful, with the consequence that important rr~ges get overlooked, or "lost" in archives. We explain how em~l over/oad/ng arises and propose technical solutions to the problem.
The analysis of the vast storehouse of email content accumulated or produced by individual users has received relatively little attention other than for specific tasks such as spam and virus filtering. Current email analysis in standard client applications consists of keyword based matching techniques for filtering and expert driven manual exploration of email files. We have implemented a tool, called the Email Mining Toolkit (EMT) for analyzing email archives which includes a graphical display to explore relationships between users and groups of email users. The chronological flow of an email message can be analyzed by EMT. Our design goal is to embed the technology into standard email clients, such as Outlook, revealing far more information about a user's own email history than is otherwise now possible. In this paper we detail the visualization techniques implemented in EMT. We show the utility of these tools and underlying models for detecting email misuse such as viral propagation, and spam spread as examples.
We present eArchivarius an interactive system for accessing collections of electronic mail. The system combines search, clustering visualization, and time-based visualization of email messages and people who send or received the messages.
Email has become more like a habitat than an application. It is used for a wide range of tasks such as information management and for coordination and collaboration in organizations. Our research shows that email is the place in which a great deal of work is received and delegated and is a growing portal for access to online publications and information services. It has become the place where PC users spend much if not most of their workdays (the application is always on, and is often the focus of attention). This, and the burgeoning quantities of messages and attachments that email delivers to people each day, has led users to co-opt it as a personal information management (PIM) tool. In fact this simply follows from what we have found to be a common tendency of knowledge workers, which is to embed personal information management directly into their favorite workspaces.
We describe a method for the automatic identification of communities of practice from e-mail 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 initial e-mail corpus of nearly 1 million messages collected over a 2-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.
The article focuses on tools for navigating large social cyberspaces. Ideally, Usenet members would make efficient use of bandwidth, participating actively but judiciously in newsgroups, ensuring their comments are posted only to relevant newsgroups, and abiding by the local norms and culture that govern decorum. A key finding of collective action studies shows that mutual awareness of other participants' histories and relationships is critical to a cooperative outcome. The challenges of cooperation are heightened further when people are able to draw from a resource without contribution. Interfaces, like email and news browsers, that provide access to social cyberspaces such as discussion boards, email lists and chat rooms, present limited, if any, information about the social context of the interactions they host. Basic social cues about the size and nature of groups are missing, making discovery, navigation, and self-regulation an increasing challenge as the size and scope of these spaces expand. While people can eventually develop a refined sense of the rhythms, leaders, and fools in a particular social cyber space, the information does not come easily or easily transfer to other spaces. With little sense of the presence of other people, individuals have a difficult time forming cooperative relationships.
On the Internet conversations between hundreds or thousands of people exchanging thousands of messages have become commonplace. The size of these very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) make them difficult for participants and interested observers to understand and critically reflect upon. To facilitate understanding of the social and semantic structure of VLSCs two tools from the social sciences-social networks and semantic networks have been used and extended for the purposes of interface design. As interface devices, social and semantic networks need to be flexible, layered diagrams that are useful as a means for exploring and cross-indexing the large volumes of messages that constitute the archives of VLSCs. This paper discusses the design criteria necessary for transforming social scientific representations into interface devices. The discussion is illustrated with the description of the Conversation Map system, an implemented system for browsing VLSCs.
To date, work in microarrays, sequenced genomes and bioinformatics
has focused largely on algorithmic methods for processing and
manipulating vast biological data sets. Future improvements will likely
provide users with guidance in selecting the most appropriate algorithms
and metrics for identifying meaningful clusters-interesting patterns in
large data sets, such as groups of genes with similar profiles.
Hierarchical clustering has been shown to be effective in microarray
data analysis for identifying genes with similar profiles and thus
possibly with similar functions. Users also need an efficient
visualization tool, however, to facilitate pattern extraction from
microarray data sets. The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer integrates
four interactive features to provide information visualization
techniques that allow users to control the processes and interact with
the results. Thus, hybrid approaches that combine powerful algorithms
with interactive visualization tools will join the strengths of fast
processors with the detailed understanding of domain experts
Sequential data is easily understood through a simple line graph, yet systems to search such data typically rely on complex interfaces or query languages. This paper presents QuerySketch, a financial database application in which graphs are used for query input as well as output. QuerySketch allows users to sketch a graph freehand, then view stocks whose price histories match the sketch. Using the same graphical format for both input and output results in an interface that is powerful, flexible, yet easy to use.
The Usenet is a quintessential Internet social phenomenon: it is huge, global, anarchic and rapidly growing. It is also mostly invisible. Although, it is the largest example of a conferencing or discussion group system, the tools generally available to access it only display leaves and branches - chains of messages and responses. None present the trees and forest. With hundreds of thousands of new messages every day, it is impossible to try to read them all to get a sense of the entire place. As a result, an overview of activity in the Usenet has been difficult to assemble and many basic questions about its size, shape, structure and dynamics have gone unanswered. How big is the Usenet? How many people post? Where are they from? When and where do they post? How do groups vary from one another and over time? How many different kinds of groups are there? How many groups successfully thrive and how many die? What do the survivors have that the others lack? How do different social cyberspaces connect and fit together and form a larger ecology?
A study of email responsiveness was conducted to understand how the timing of email responses conveys important information. Interviews and observations explored users' perceptions of how they responded to email and formed expectations of others' responses to them. We identified ways in which users maintain and cultivate a responsiveness image for projecting expectations about their email response. We also discuss other contextual cues people use to discover email responsiveness, which include using other tools such as the calendar and phone, accounting for the amount of work time overlap available, and establishing a pacing between email correspondents. These cues help users develop a sense of when to expect a response and when breakdown has occurred, requiring further action.
It has been proposed that email clients could be improved if they presented messages grouped into conversations. An email conversation is the tree of related messages that arises from the use of the reply operation. We propose two models of conversation. The first model characterizes a conversation as a chronological sequence of messages; the second as a tree based on the reply relationship. We show how existing email clients and prior research projects implicitly support each model to a greater or lesser degree depending on their design, but none fully supports both models simultaneously. We present a mixed-model visualization that simultaneously presents sequence and reply relationships among the messages of a conversation, making both visible at a glance. We describe the integration of the visualization into a working prototype email client. A usability study indicates that the system meets our usability goals and verifies that the visualization fully conveys both types of relationships within the messages of an email conversation.
This paper describes Thread Arcs, a novel interactive visualization technique designed to help people use threads found in email. Thread Arcs combine the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread in a mixed-model visualization (Venolia and Neustaedter 2003) that is stable and compact. By quickly scanning and interacting with Thread Arcs, people can see various attributes of conversations and find relevant messages in them easily. We tested this technique against other visualization techniques with users' own email in a functional prototype email client. Thread Arcs proved an excellent match for the types of threads found in users' email and for the qualities users wanted in small-scale visualizations. CR Categories: H.5.2 User Interfaces, H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces, I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques
This paper describes a series of interviews that focus on the ways that professional office workers use electronic mail to manage their daily work. A number of implications for the design of flexible mail systems are discussed.
Two principal claims are made. First, electronic mail is more than just a communication system. In addition to supporting information management, it provides a mechanism for supporting a variety of time management and task management activities. Some people are prioritizers, concentrating on the problem of managing incoming messages. Others are archivers, concentrating on how to archive information for subsequent use. Similarly, some people use mail to delegate tasks, while others perform tasks delegated to them by others electronically.
The second claim is that use of electronic mail is strikingly diverse, although not infinitely so. Individuals vary in their preferences, both in their general willingness to manage their work electronically and in their specific preferences along the dimensions described above. This diversity implies that one's own experiences with electronic mail are unlikely to provide sufficient understanding of other's uses of mail. Mail designers should thus seek flexible primitives that capture the important dimensions and provide flexibility for a wide range of users.
Techniques for partitioning objects into optimally homogeneous groups on the basis of empirical measures of similarity among those objects have received increasing attention in several different fields. This paper develops a useful correspondence between any hierarchical system of such clusters, and a particular type of distance measure. The correspondence gives rise to two methods of clustering that are computationally rapid and invariant under monotonic transformations of the data. In an explicitly defined sense, one method forms clusters that are optimally “connected,” while the other forms clusters that are optimally “compact.”
A fundamental problem in text data mining is to extract meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. E-mail and news articles are two natural examples of such streams, each characterized by topics that appear, grow in intensity for a period of time, and then fade away. The published literature in a particular research field can be seen to exhibit similar phenomena over a much longer time scale. Underlying much of the text mining work in this area is the following intuitive premise—that the appearance of a topic in a document stream is signaled by a “burst of activity,” with certain features rising sharply in frequency as the topic emerges.
The goal of the present work is to develop a formal approach for modeling such “bursts,” in such a way that they can be robustly and efficiently identified, and can provide an organizational framework for analyzing the underlying content. The approach is based on modeling the stream using an infinite-state automaton, in which bursts appear naturally as state transitions; it can be viewed as drawing an analogy with models from queueing theory for bursty network traffic. The resulting algorithms are highly efficient, and yield a nested representation of the set of bursts that imposes a hierarchical structure on the overall stream. Experiments with e-mail and research paper archives suggest that the resulting structures have a natural meaning in terms of the content that gave rise to them.
Enron email dataset Visualizing email archives Email as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management
- J R Baron
- J Donath
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Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Spotfire DecisionSite
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The decline and fall of the Enron empire
- Grieve
Grieve, T. (2003). The decline and fall of the Enron empire. Salon.com, October 14, 2003. Retrieved May 5, 2005, from http://www.salon.com/ news/feature/2003/10/14/enron/index_np.html Johnson, S.C. (1967). Hierarchical clustering schemes. Psychometrika, 2, 241–254.
Email Metadata in a Post-Armstrong World', 3 rd IEEE Metadata Conference, http://www.computer.org/proceedings/meta
- J R Baron
Baron, J. R. (1999): 'Email Metadata in a Post-Armstrong World', 3 rd IEEE Metadata
Conference, http://www.computer.org/proceedings/meta/1999/papers/83/jbaron.html
Donath, J. (2004): 'Visualizing Email Archives (Draft)',
http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/EmailArchives.draft.pdf
Email metadata in a post-Armstrong world
- J R Baron
- Smith