Summary:
“Visualizing Email Content” is a continuation of research based upon how we use emails in everyday life, and what those emails, when analyzed, show. Their previous research was based on patterns in the time where users created emails. This is based in the patterns of communication these emails create over time, especially between two users. They then go into a very lengthy literature review, followed by a description of their new research “Themail”. Themail is a way to visualize your email content and what you say regularly, both to a specific person or overall. It also works based on either a month by month or yearly basis. They say the basis for monthly and yearly is because yearly shows what is essentially a summary of your communications, whereas monthly varies much more due to select events occurring in a given month (they cite things like weddings or holidays). Then they go into detail on how their process works. First, they get an email archive, filter out everything that isn’t useful, such as spam, then calculate the key words from the email archive, reporting them back in their UI. They then talk about their two different modes of searching that were created after user feedback, the needle and haystack modes. Haystack provided a long-term view of the overall relationship with someone, where the needle mode showed very specific details of emails.
Reflection:
I like that they start with a large amount of literature review. It’s a really good example of what we need to be doing for our final reports. As well it just gives a lot more information than most if we’re interested in the topic. Their application of using monthly keywords to actually search for emails from that month is ingenious, and it’s something I didn’t even think about until they said it. I will admit, looking at their UI, it seems extremely cluttered. The grey words on the background make everything else very hard to read. Their way to filter out emails that aren’t useful to the analysis is very interesting though, and might be something for my group to consider when it comes to finding fake news articles. Perhaps checking if a user has used a site before? That seems a bit dangerous though. Their word scoring could also be useful, although time is not a variable in our analysis. The differences in the needle and haystack modes were interesting, although I wish they had been a bit better explained, I had some difficulty figuring out how they majorly differed (or at least what the needle mode was supposed to be doing, the haystack mode sounded like the original idea for their project).
Questions:
The researchers describe emails as “abstractly sterile”. Is there a better way to communicate in a way like email, but more akin to face to face speaking?
What do you think your emails show overall? How might an email set with a close friend differ from one with someone else like an employer?
How interested would you be in seeing an overview of something like your texts from a few years ago?
