Summary
The article “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories”, talks about a program called Themail. Themail is a visualization of the past emails you have. It grabs keywords from your emails and puts them into a visual portrait that you can use to visualize the kind of conversations you have with people. It has two layers, one of yearly words used frequently and another layer of monthly used words. They play on the size of words to help distinguish which words are used more frequently than others. Once they tested it out to the public, they were able to analyze that users either went with a haystack or needle method. The haystack method was more towards looking at things in a bigger picture. The users were more focused on the general kinds of conversations they were having with people. The needle method was more detail oriented and users wanted to find more specific conversations they had with people at specific times. At first people that followed the needle method were not impressed but when they were asked what kind of conversations they had, most users were able to remember and visualize what kind of conversation they had at that time. The application of this visualization is not for daily use because it uses an accumulation of emails from your past.
Reflection
This visualization is very interesting in how simple it is but how much information it gives to the users. It is simple parsing that grabs keywords that are used frequently from past emails; however, from this visualization, a user can get so much information of what kind of conversations and what kind of relationship they have with family and friends. It even allows two different uses. One that is more general and gives you a bigger picture of what kind of conversations you are having. The other view is more detailed and focuses on specific times and people you talk to. Both give you information on what conversations you have with that specific person and what kind of language you use. A simple visualization like this is amazing how little information is given but how meaningful that data is.
Questions
• Could this visualization be applied to other things than email like twitter?
• Is there a better way to represent the information in a different visual representation?
• If this is not really beneficial for daily use, is there a way we can make it useful to the user to keep checking?
• Is this information actionable or is it just interesting information people can get from using this visualization?
