themail

a visualization of email archives
by Fernanda Viégas

Using the content of exchanged messages, Themail shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how these terms change over the period of the relationship.

Each column of words refers to emails exchanged in a given month with the selected person. The more salient and unique a word is in one’s conversation (in comparison to all other conversations in the archive), the bigger that word appears in the visualization. This causes different flavors or conversations to emerge; for example, emails to family members look at lot different from emails exchanged with coworkers.

Each circle represents an email message exchanged with the selected person during that month. The size of the circle shows the length of the email. Different colors represent the direction of the email: red- outgoing emails brown- incoming emails to the owner of the archive gray- incoming emails sent to lists the person subscribes to

Academic paper: Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories