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?

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Summary 

This article discusses how email archives can be visualized to show individual relationships over a span of time based the frequency of and distinction of the words used in the interactions called Themail. They discuss other similar programs created to analyze email archives, but this is the only program that analyzes it based off the relationship between the user instead of just simply header information. Through their research they have found that the patterns displayed over time are significant to that persons life. This application is aimed at the end user instead of other sectors of the social network analysis community. Their visualization is comprised of two types of words: yearly and monthly. Yearly words are static and are large an grey, and faint in the background showing the most commonly used words over the year. Monthly words are interactive, yellow, and shown in the foreground as stacks on the timeline of the screen as a space. These words can be selected and interacted with to see the emails they showed in and other contexts. Additionally, there are circles that are exchanged in a month, the size of the circle indicates how lengthy the message was. The main functionalities this application tries to accomplish is to show the user (1) what do I talk about with a specific person in my email and (2) what are the differences in my conversations between people. This was used in user studies and case studies that gave positive feedback on this application, in which most users preferred the overall view (called haystack), instead of the detailed view you get from clicking on each word monthly (called needle). They liked the application to be able to see and remember their interactions with people. Some of the disadvantages to the way this application was created are that it does not differentiate between expressions, it only sees individuals words, limiting its accuracy in portraying an exact relationship in social terms we have learned as humans in society.

Reflection 

I understand why they chose to do the project and that there was positive feedback from users who volunteered to use the software. However, I do not actually see the value this applications brings to society. That might be because email is outdated, if they were to look at my vt email, it would just show the amount of work I have done, and not personal relationships, or travel records at the most. This applied to messenger applications might be interesting, but still I don’t know what value that brings, besides a emotional value. This emotional value of “looking back” is something a lot of companies deal with our online data have seemed to integrate into their applications. Both Facebook and Google Photos have a “rediscover this day” and “friend-aversairy”. Which at times I, as a user, enjoy when its applicable, sometimes they choose people I no longer have a strong connection without or funerals. I think the concept of reflecting on your life is interesting and something that is good for social media applications. I think this being applied to a different messenger might be something I could see more applications for, but honestly, now that the “rediscover this day” has been out a while, it has lost a lot of steam. I no longer share those anymore, I sometimes take a second to smile, or just simply think “oh yeah that happened”. But I don’t see a long term usage or need for an application like this. What value does this bring? Its the same concept that by the time Google Photos came out with “rediscover this day”, I was already over it. Because it doesn’t really add that much value, and multiple interfaces are reminding me of that event or lots of events. I don’t see a user sitting down at the end of every week/month and using this application to review what interactions they had because its not fulfilling an need they have. I see a user maybe every year, or every few years looking back at it, but then why develop this for an user to barely use unless its just for other purposes and other applications within the industry. This application extended and maybe integrated into the already existing thoughts of “rediscovering” a time, a relationship. or a place, might be of some use. I think users like it in the study like, cause I would like it and think its interesting, but not daily use applicable or even weekly or even monthly.

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Summary

The article begins by describing email and the researchers’ past work with creating visualization for user’s email conversations. One particularly interesting part is how they mention that most people save all their emails, so this works great when doing research on the topic because there is plenty of data. The actual project they have created is called Themail, a visualization of a user’s email archive, they also performed research and found two prevalent themes among user reactions, the needle and the haystack.  Themail is set up as an interface that shows columns of words that are visually changed based on how much they are used as well as their distinctiveness in compared to other conversations, so bigger words are used often and uniquely in that particular conversation over time. Gaps between the columns indicate periods of time where no conversation occurred. The columns were also separated into two categories, yearly and monthly words.  Yearly words provided a broad overview of a relationship between two people over a large period of time, while monthly words indicate snapshots of events that occurred between those people. In the end it was found that the users they showed the application to, generally enjoyed using it and would like to have it integrated with their email client. Of the two modes, needle and haystack, many users liked to use the haystack mode. The haystack mode was the general use where you get to look at how your whole conversation with someone changed over time. A smaller number of people liked the needle mode, where you can look for specific words and find where they were said in that conversation. Overall, Themail was a successful experiment in the visualization of data.

Reflection

I think this was an interesting read because I like to read about how people go about implementing software. I also feel like it would be useful to have a piece of software that performs these functions. I especially would like to have the search feature, there have been a lot of times where I would need to find when a particular conversation happened. I don’t know how much use I would get out of the “haystack” portrait feature because most of my emails are for business or school and I don’t really have a lot of emotional emails to look back on, as that is what texting is for. The creators of the application definitely had a creative way to visualize the data though, as all the properties like word size and blank space are easily picked out from the visualization, and it is certainly clear what they represent. Visualization and user experience are fundamental when designing any kind of user application, this article represents that and also makes it more clear that our project needs to uphold these tenants in our design. However it is difficult to do this without user input, which is what the developers of Themail saw after users pointed out problems in the weight given to words in certain phrases.

Questions

• How could you go about visualizing people’s text message conversations? Would it be similar or significantly different?
• Why do you think more people enjoyed the “haystack” aspect of the program?
• Is there an alternative design for Themail that could be more effective?

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Summary

The article “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories” is about Themail, a visualization that shows how people correspond to each other and how their relationship changes over time. It explains the parsing approach and interface, and further implications for research related to email content visualization. According to the article, users store a vast amount of emails ranging from insignificant to important. While many of these emails are insignificant, the pattern of emailing in which we develop becomes important. Two major themes are discussed: the appreciation of the overall picture, known as the haystack, and seeking specific pieces of information, known as the needle. Email visualizations fall into four main categories: thread based visualizations, social-network visualizations, temporal visualizations, and contact-based visualizations. Themail displays its information in yearly words and monthly words. Yearly words are used to show a broad overall tone of the relationship. This shows what people are usually conversing about, while ignoring words that are only used on special occasion. Monthly words are used to show a much more detailed portrait of past email exchanges. People were excited to look back at their email archives, and preferred looking at archives related to their family and loved ones.

Reflection

I believe that Themail is an extremely useful tool that should be used by all people that frequently email. Although I had never heard of it before, I would be very interested to interact with the tool to see the visualizations of my email archives. I think that this is something that should be more publicly broadcasted to the public, because many people do not delete their emails. People keep emails of conversations, news, and other relevant information that could be useful to analyze. It would be interesting to see this tool used on other platforms besides email. Many people have conversations on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and rarely delete their messages. Seeing also how their results vary between platforms, analyzing whether or not they talk about certain topics more on specific platforms.

Questions

Are there any other visualizations out there like this?

Could this tool be incorporated into other social computing platforms?

 

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Article: “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories”

Authors: Fernanda B. Viégas, Scott Golder, Judith Donath

Summary

The authors of this paper developed Themail a tool that parsed user email correspondences and displayed yearly and monthly keywords. They implemented two modes “haystack” and “needle”. Haystack mode displayed words on the screen that showed more general, big picture themes and trends. Needle mode picked out more minute detail. Most users preferred haystack mode, specifically reflecting on their discourses with family and loved ones. One of their methods included taking special measures to isolate and consolidate correspondences with specific individuals. That is, they made sure that if a user had several email addresses associated “John Smith”, the addresses were consolidated into a single contact.

Reflection

Themail is and interesting social tool. One might use it like a photo album or an evolving time capsule. It would be interesting to integrate other media and info such as photos, gifs, videos, location crossovers, routes, etc.

Questions

What would be the effect of “facebooking” this tool such that users were exposed only to correspondences that they were more positively engaged in?

Another leaf out of facebook – might users enjoy a video-graphic memoir of their meaningful correspondences?

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