Presentation prepared by Cori Faklaris of the Viégas et al. 2006 paper on the "Themail" email visualization tool for H565 Collaborative and Social Computing, Fall 2015, in the Department of Human-Centered Computing at IUPUI's School of Informatics and Computing.

1. Visualizing Email Content:
Portraying Relationships from
Conversational Histories
Viégas, F. B., Golder, S., & Donath, J. (2006, April). In Proceedings
of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing
systems (pp. 979-988). ACM.
Discussion lead: Cori Faklaris H565 11/10/15

2. About the study

3. Predecessor:
“Conversation
Map” (2003)
Example:
Usenet
newsgroup
soc.culture.
albanian

4. “Themail” visualization of email stored in multiple
mailboxes (2006)

5. 1. What sorts of things do I, the owner of
the archive, talk about with each of my
email contacts?
2. How do my email conversations with
one person differ from those with other
people?
The Themail tool answers two main questions:

6. Interface:
• One relationship displayed at a
time
• “Yearly” words large, faint in
background = most used in 1
year
• Yearly words are static and
unclickable
Components of the Themail system:
Content-parsing:
“Monthly” words in yellow, appear
in foreground = selection and
font size dictated by frequency of
use and distinctiveness to
relationship
Select these to recall email
messages that caused the
keyword to appear in the timeline

7. Components of the Themail system:
Content-parsing:
• “Monthly” words in yellow, appear
in foreground = selection and font
size dictated by frequency of use
and distinctiveness to relationship
• Select keywords to recall email
messages that caused the keyword
to appear in the timeline
• Type letters to highlight in timeline

8. Content-parsing:
• User uploads mailboxes for both
outgoing and incoming mail
• Can identify all emails that belong to
the same person, i.e
jane@smith.com, janesmith@u.edu
• Discards spam = user never emailed
Components of the Themail system (cont’d):
Content-parsing:
• Uses Salton’s TFIDF algorithm
to score relative frequency of
keywords
• “Yearly” keywords weighted
higher than “monthly” keywords
• Outputs a datafile that is read by
the visualization

9. Methodology for study
• 16 evaluators ages 18-53
• 4 female, 12 male
• Selected from population of
university and tech/telecom
industry contacts
• Recruited via mailing lists
• No $$ compensation
• Distributed to participants
via email, used privately
• Users know dataset
• Semi-structured interviews
of 90 minutes to debrief
• Interviews recorded for
content coding

10. Results
• Average
participant
enjoyment: 3.9
on a 5 scale
• Would use
again? 87%
said yes

11. Results: “Haystack” mode -- “big picture”
• Most participants were reported to be excited at looking
back at this portrait of their past selves.
• They took pleasure in using it to reminisce in the same
way as paging through a photo album.
• The tool helped them to recall details of their past
relationships and to view how these evolved over time,
such as from peer to boss or child to adult.

12. Results: “Needle” mode
• About 1 in 5 participants wanted to use Themail to search
for specific bits of information.
• These participants often were underwhelmed by the tool.
• The ease of querying specific emails -- through the ability
to select keywords and see which emails caused the
words to appear in the visualization -- increased trust in
and acceptance of the tool.

13. Limitations
• Too high of weight given to
topical keywords in forwarded
messages
• Stock email signatures generate
unrepresentative keywords
• Doesn’t know expressions, only
words = misses phrases’ tone
and texture

14. Among the implications:
• HCI method has benefits: Tested in a natural setting (“in the
wild”) and with familiar data, so users quickly pointed out key
problems and didn’t have to worry about privacy of their data.
• Propose the importance of personal identification with data
based on methodology, results.
• Email is a habitat like other forms of digital communication.
Analytics can be valuable feedback to improve how it’s used.

15. Other
visualizations for
email

16. Stephen Wolfram’s “Personal Analytics” for email, other data (2012)
(http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/)

17. Gmail Meter (2012)
(http://www.gmailmeter.com/)

18. MIT’s Immersion email visualization
(2013)
(http://immersion.media.mit.edu)

19. Social media
analytics
dashboards

20. Klout dashboard

21. Twitter notification highlights

22. Twitter analytics
dashboard

23. Facebook Memories

24. Facebook Page
Insights

25. Discussion

26. 1a. What are the benefits of being
able to visualize email
conversations?

27. Benefits discussed in the paper
● Data as portrait, like a photo album.
● See the evolution of relationships.
● Get new perspectives on relationships.
● Be reminded of events that had been forgotten.

28. Benefits discussed elsewhere
● Get a richer understanding of your past self = self-reflection.
● A form of artistic expression with beauty and power in itself.
● Helps the users explore privacy and disclosure by drawing users’
attention to conversational data in a new context.
● Aid users to become more efficient managers and project leaders by
visualizing time on tasks: activity and backlogs.
● It could be a effective feedback tool to improve email usage.
Sources: MIT Immersion project website, Stephen Wolfram interview in Harvard Business Review

29. My take
● Because email today for me is associated with
overwhelming stress, I tend to avoid it. A tool such as this
could lure me back to using email as a primary channel of
communication by re-associating it with the pleasure and
social benefits during my first use of email in the Unix era.

30. 1b. How effective was Themail at
providing these benefits?

31. 1c. How could it be improved?

32. ● Remove forwarded emails and cut out email signatures to scrub data
of unrepresentative keywords.
● Would be useful to analyze traffic patterns to help determine if an
email is part of a conversation or is instead a broadcast.
● Themail doesn’t know expressions = can’t grasp tone, texture.
● Show literacy level of the conversations, length of email threads,
graphs of sent/received email over time.
Limitations / suggestions for improvement

33. 2a. The majority of participants used
Themail in the “haystack” mode.
Why do you think this is?
(Shanglei Zhang)

34. Why “haystack” mode
● It’s new. Participants took it at face value.
● Participants responded to the aesthetic expression of the software
(the colors, arrangement of words in the timeline format, differing
sizes of the keywords) as much as the content.
● Most people found pleasure in reminiscing as if it were a photo album.
This may not be an uncommon reaction to receiving ego-centric
feedback in social or collaborative software.

35. 2b. How do you see yourself using
an email visualization tool
such as Themail?

36. In “The Secret Life of Online Moms:
Anonymity and Disinhibition on
YouBeMom.com,” researchers used the
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)
and Phrase Net tools and Word Tree
software to analyze and visualize information
scraped from a website. ...

37. 3. How does Themail’s method differ
from the YouBeMoms.com analysis?
Why would you use one versus the
other in HCI research?
(Hanlin Li)

38. YouBeMoms.com study vs. Themail study
● The YouBeMoms.com data spanned four years, 4.8
million posts and 47 million comments. Quantitative,
removed from users.
● Themail used privately. Less data (but still: average
number of mailboxes uploaded was 19, spanning up to
more than 9 years). Qualitative, ethnographic.
● Themail participants helped guide interpretations.
● What is study purpose? Description vs. exploration.

39. 4a. If you conducted the Themail
study today, do you think you would
see the same results as 10 years
ago?

40. 4b. How applicable is this tool and
insights to the way we communicate
today, such as through messaging
apps or social media such as
Facebook or Instagram?

41. Thank you!