The NY Times on Mapping Email Patterns · 133 words posted 05/22/2005 10:40 AM
Gina Kolata of the New York Times reports today on finding patterns in corporate emails: Enron Offers an Unlikely Boost to E-Mail Surveillance.
With access to large bodies of email, scientists hope to spot and map patterns of interaction:
For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone’s memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant?
The article includes a map generated by Dr. Carey E. Priebe and Youngser Park of Johns Hopkins University (see detail above). The patterns generated are similar to Marcos Weskamp’s popular Social Circles mailing list mapper.
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