EmailTime: visual analytics and statistics for temporal email

Minoo Erfani Joorabchi; Ji-Dong Yim; Christopher D. Shaw

doi:10.1117/12.871712

24 January 2011 EmailTime: visual analytics and statistics for temporal email

Minoo Erfani Joorabchi, Ji-Dong Yim, Christopher D. Shaw

Proceedings Volume 7868, Visualization and Data Analysis 2011; 78680Q (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.871712
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2011, San Francisco Airport, California, United States

Abstract

Although the discovery and analysis of communication patterns in large and complex email datasets are difficult tasks, they can be a valuable source of information. We present EmailTime, a visual analysis tool of email correspondence patterns over the course of time that interactively portrays personal and interpersonal networks using the correspondence in the email dataset. Our approach is to put time as a primary variable of interest, and plot emails along a time line. EmailTime helps email dataset explorers interpret archived messages by providing zooming, panning, filtering and highlighting etc. To support analysis, it also measures and visualizes histograms, graph centrality and frequency on the communication graph that can be induced from the email collection. This paper describes EmailTime's capabilities, along with a large case study with Enron email dataset to explore the behaviors of email users within different organizational positions from January 2000 to December 2001. We defined email behavior as the email activity level of people regarding a series of measured metrics e.g. sent and received emails, numbers of email addresses, etc. These metrics were calculated through EmailTime. Results showed specific patterns in the use email within different organizational positions. We suggest that integrating both statistics and visualizations in order to display information about the email datasets may simplify its evaluation.

Citation Download Citation

Minoo Erfani Joorabchi, Ji-Dong Yim, and Christopher D. Shaw "EmailTime: visual analytics and statistics for temporal email", Proc. SPIE 7868, Visualization and Data Analysis 2011, 78680Q (24 January 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.871712

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