Summary:
The article “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories”, written by Fernanda B. Viégas, Scott Golder, Judith Donath, is another look at the way we use email to communicate. The article focus around using Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. The authors had participants use the visualization software to see how they would interact and analyze the data. They do this through analyzing a large dataset of the users emails and filter out unwanted email such as spam or one off emails until they have the relevant dataset of emails. They found that their were two main interaction modes with the visualization, exploration of “big picture” trends and themes (“haystack”) and more detail-oriented exploration (“needle”). They also found that the vast majority of people tended to stick with the haystack approach and would look at the connection to loved ones and family. Users that chose to analyze with the needle method were less focused on the relationships and were usually searching of a specific piece of information usually pertaining to work. While this method and the tool of Themail are interesting to users, the study found that most users would not usually utilize Themail or a similar application in their day to day lives. They would instead come back to it on occasion usually for the purpose of reminiscing and wanting to see the old connections and relationships they old with others.
Reflection:
Overall I really liked the article and the findings that the authors came to. I found it very intriguing to watch how users would use the system when it was provided to them with a proper dataset and could see an accurate representation of their connections. I understood that for the scope of their project why they filter out the spam and other areas they deemed unwanted but I also wish they had done some studies with it in so we could see the “fake” relationships that spam would cause the program to think the user has. I think it could be a very interesting experience to view the clutter that users get from spam and try to see its overall affect to the ecosystem. I found it curious that the two final groups, haystack and needle, were sections off the way they were. I feel like from the overall perspective of the app that all users would start out haystack and then utilize the needle function when searching for individual pieces of information. So I see them less as two distinct groups but more tools to use to comb through all the information as a whole.
Questions:
- What could leaving all the spam and one time emails in show us?
- Could a third group be added in that is an in-between stage? Not full stack but not quite needle.
- Should email services work this type of technology into themselves for all users benefit?
- Does this kind of technology create a worry for email privacy?
- Just how much information is too much to give away for the convenience of data analysis and prediction?
