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Themail with Scott Golder and Judith Donath |
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Most tools for
handling email archives have focused on the task of finding either specific messages or the "important" emails. Less attention has been paid to the overall patterns of communication that can be gleaned from the daily accumulation of messages over time. Nevertheless, the patterns of communication we build up over time are themselves significant. As email archives grow, they become valuable records of people’s relationships. Themail is a
typographic visualization of an individual’s email content over
time. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words
that characterize one’s correspondence with different individuals and how
they change over the period of these relationships. The interface shows
a series of columns of keywords arranged along a timeline; focusing
on dyadic relationships. |
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Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories | ||
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PostHistory with David Nguyen and Judith Donath |
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PostHistory was my
first attempt at visualizing a person's email history. The
visualization depicts quantitative aspects of a user's email
activity on a daily basis, focusing on questions such as: When
does a new person appear in your email history? When does an
individual fade out of your email history? How many messages are
sent to you personally as opposed to messages sent to lists of
people? How strong are the ties in your network (i.e., what is the
frequency of contact and how personal are those contacts?). For more
information, check out the
PostHistory project page. It was after testing this application with users that I realized the power of visualization as a social artifact. Several PostHistory users wanted to share their visualization images with friends and family for storytelling purposes. This unexpected result helped inspire a new line of research for me: communication-minded visualization. |
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Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments | ||
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Mountain | ||||
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Mountain visualizes a
person's email archive in terms of all the people with whom this
person has been in touch over the years. The piece is a commentary on the continuous accumulation of email contacts over time and the large amounts of people we are constantly in touch with over email. |
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Newsgroup Crowds
and Authorlines with Marc Smith |
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Most news browsing
interfaces display minimal, if any, information about the authors of
messages. When reading a post, users get no sense of the author’s
history; how active they are in the particular group, how long they
have contributed to the community, in what other conversations they
have engaged in the past, etc. Instead, systems for newsgroup
browsing tend to focus on the message unit and the message structure
of conversational threads. In contrast, Newsgroup Crowds and
Authorlines attempt to support social awareness by combining metrics
of authors’ activity with data visualization. Newsgroup Crowds visualizes the population of authors in a particular newsgroup, illustrating and contrasting the interaction patterns of participants within the community. AuthorLines visualizes a particular author's posting activity across all newsgroups over time, revealing patterns of thread initiation and reply that can broadly characterize the roles authors play in Usenet. |
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Newsgroup Crowds and Authorlines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cybersapces | ||
