Email as co-habitat in distributed organisations

Email has now become so ubiquitous that it has surpassed its early role as an asynchronous communication tool. Having contributed to the rise of the distributed organisation, email is being used in diverse ways and for purposes for which it was not intended. It is no longer a technology of individual habitats, but one where members of distributed organisations co-habit. This paper charts the study of email management, from early investigations of personal approaches to handling email overload, through to a review of software applications designed to ameliorate this. It suggests that while email has been appropriated for information and knowledge management, there has been minimal analysis of this beyond the individual. Therefore, it presents a case study of a distributed organisation, detailing the process by which email was leveraged for organisational knowledge through the design of an application that enabled visualisation of email data

Overcoming the Digital Tsunami in e-Discovery: is Visual Analysis the Answer?

New technologies are generating potentially discoverable evidence in electronic form in ever increasing volumes. As a result, traditional techniques of document search and retrieval in pursuit of electronic discovery in litigation are becoming less viable. One potential new technological solution to the e-discovery search and retrieval challenge is Visual Analysis (VA). VA is a technology that combines the computational power of the computer with graphical representations of large datasets to enable interactive analytic capabilities. This article provides an overview of VA technology and how it is being applied in the analysis of e-mail and other electronic documents in the field of e-discovery, as well as discussing several challenges and limitations of the technology. The article concludes that VA has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of current search and retrieval techniques, but that addressing the digital tsunami is more likely to be achieved by using VA in combination with other search and retrieval technologies in the context of creating an effective data governance program

Visualizing rhythms of intimacy in email communication

Email has developed into one of the most extensively used computer applications. Email interfaces, on the other hand, have gone through very few transformations since their inception. As the growing volumes of email data accumulate in users' email boxes, these interfaces fail to provide effective message handling and browsing support. Saved email messages provide not only a vast and pulsating record of one's electronic past, but also a potential source of valuable insights into the structure and dynamics of one's social network. In this thesis, we introduce a visualization approach to email that draws upon emailÂs inherently personal character and uses intimacy as a key parameter. We have developed faMailiar, a novel email interface that visualizes email in a chronological manner through two alternative, calendar-like views that present email activity on different time granularity scales. Visual mappings of email data and support for filtering help the user see rhythms and patterns in her social interactions. Zooming, panning and implicit semantic zooming facilitate navigation across large email collections. This thesis also describes our iterative, human-centered design method. Two user studies have been performed at different stages of the process, and we explain their purpose, results and implications