Using Rhythms of Relationships to Understand E-Mail Archives

Due to e-mail’s ubiquitous nature, millions of users are intimate with the technology; however, most users are only familiar with managing their own e-mail, which is an inherently different task from exploring an e-mail archive. Historians and social scientists believe that e-mail archives are important artifacts for understanding the individuals and communities they represent. To understand the conversations evidenced in an archive, context is needed. In this article, we present a new way to gain this necessary context: analyzing the temporal rhythms of social relationships. We provide methods for constructing meaningful rhythms from the e-mail headers by identifying relationships and interpreting their attributes.With these visualization techniques, e-mail archive explorers can uncover insights that may have been otherwise hidden in the archive. We apply our methods to an individual’s 15-year e-mail archive, which consists of about 45,000 messages and over 4,000 relationships