Summary
The paper “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories” introduces Themail, a different take on visualizing email archives. Using interaction histories found in email archives, the typographic visualization is able to create a visual representation of relationships. The visual representation is composed of words found in the content of exchanged messages to characterize and show how relationships change over time. Keywords are shown on a timeline in a series of columns where the keywords are shown in different colors and sizes based on their frequency and distinctiveness. Themail is capable of displaying multiple layers of information where yearly words are large faint words that show up in background and monthly words are columns of yellow words show up in the foreground. Yearly words are the most used terms over a year of email exchange while monthly words are the most distinctive and frequently used words over a month of email exchange. When studying the use of Themail by users, two main interaction modes were noticed: the haystack mode and the needle mode. About 80% of participants used the haystack mode while 20% used the needle mode. The haystack mode presents the overall patterns of the visualization while the needle mode focuses on the individual pieces of information.
Reflection
Themail reminded me of word clouds except the words are in column format. Personally, I do not see how it can be useful especially since I do not use email that often for long term communication. I did not understand the anecdotes of users enjoying the visualization for family use because it seems like the actual writings would have more value than the individual words. Nowadays, I think the use of this would better fit for text messaging or instant messaging because those ways are more common for communication. Visualizing instant messaging would probably different since people usually do not write as if they are writing an email when texting.
Questions
- What other structures/organization of the words could be helpful?
- How could this be used in other modes of communication?
