Summary
The paper, “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories”, discusses Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships based off interaction histories preserved in email archives. Through Themail, key words that characterize an individual’s correspondence with another are displayed and the user can view how these words change over time. Themail can display multiple layers of information, yearly words or monthly words. Yearly words are shown as large faint words and are the most used terms over an entire year while monthly words are shown in yellow and are the most used terms over a month. Themail was evaluated by sixteen participants and from the results there were two main interaction modes that were observed. These two modes are called “the haystack” and “the needle”. The “haystack” is a “big picture” look at the information while the “needle” is more detail-oriented approach. Most of the participants used “haystack” mode over “needle” mode.
Reflection
I found this article to be an interesting read. With how often we receive emails, it’s easy to forget how emails can contain a lot of information about how we interact with others. I think this tool would be great for reminiscing, like how Facebook has the feature where it reminds you of the yearly anniversary of your friendship with someone. However, since this article has been written, email has become less used as it used to be. Most people interact online through instant messaging. I personally use email for professional purposes such as for work or school while I would chat with my friends and family through instant messaging tools or apps like Facebook Messenger and Google Hangout. Thus, it would be great to see a visualization tool that could be used on instant messaging.
Questions
- How could this tool be updated to today’s social media?
- What could be changed so that Themail would be more likely to be used on a daily basis?
