Outlook: Email Archives , 1990-2007

Outlook: Email Archives,
1990-2007
After the Digital Revolution, January 2018
James Baker
Lecturer in Digital History and Archives
@j_w_baker
james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
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@j_w_baker james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
What have I left out? Please write anything
YOU think I should have mentioned. For
example I’d like to ask you about electronic
mail too as a [sic] know a very few of you
begun using it regularly. If you have the
time to write about your use of e-mail, and
whether it has replaced the use of the
telephone for you, I would be most
interested
Mass Observation Project. 1996 Autumn/Winter Directive.

PRINT EVERYTHING OUT AND STORE IT?!
What do you do all day? Flipping heck. I
occasionally print some work things out ...I
store them in folders on the system. But I
have to confess to having printed out a fair
few emails from my ex, but lost track of how
to file them and so really they’re just filed in
my hotmail
Mass Observation Project Archive. 2004. O2049, Female, 45, Single, Careers Manager.

There was one piece that I wrote about the
reasons why I decided to leave my husband,
and I considered that such a significant
piece that I printed it and kept is and
showed it to my parents (not convinced)
and love (likewise) and mainly for myself in
case I should forget! However that hangs
about, there is no filing system for just a
few odd pieces....
Mass Observation Project Archive. 2004. T1843, Female, 55, Caseworker, Disley.

I do wish that I printed more copies of my mail
which I have done more of recently. I am keeping
a record of the responses to the news of my
pregnancy and it made me wish i’d printed out
lots more stuff to look back on. Even work related
emails. It gives you something to place yourself
in time, what happened when and to whom and
how you felt. So much detail of our everyday
lives is lost through writing e-mail and texts and
not notes and letters and small reminders at
different times prompt so many other things.
Mass Observation Project Archive. 2004. W2959, female, 36, single, Brighton, visual artist.

© author/publisher
Naomi S Baron,
Alphabet to
Email: How
Written English
Evolved and
Where It’s
Heading
(London; New
York: Routledge,
2001), 251
Is this the experience of email that was felt?
Is this profile supported by our email archives?

More than a century of familiarity with the
telephone appears to have contributed to the
increased candor commonly reported in
computer mediated encounters such as email or
online conferencing, compared with face-to-face
exchange
Naomi S. Baron, “Language of the Internet,” in The Stanford Handbook for Language
Engineers, ed. Ali Farghali (Stanford, Calif: CSLI Publications, 2002), 7
Is this any different from personal papers?
What does this mean for the ethics of email use?
How much do we need to know about telephone use to
study email use?

There is enormous variation in the language style
used in email, determined by such variables as
age and computer experience of user, function
(e.g., replacement for a formal office memo,
casual invitation to lunch next week, teenage
online flirting).
Naomi S. Baron, “Language of the Internet,” in The Stanford Handbook for Language Engineers, ed. Ali
Farghali (Stanford, Calif: CSLI Publications, 2002), 12
Can we disentangle these genres of email from the
record?
How private did people perceive their email to be?
What other types of communications did email replace?

The kind of language used in email (sometimes
ungrammatical, lacking in standard punctuation
or spelling) should not be an issue for natural
language processing or search procedures, since
such mail is usually only stored on an individual
user’s computer (and perhaps, in the case of a
company, in the organization’s back-up files),
and not the subject of mechanical analysis.
Naomi S. Baron, “Language of the Internet,” in The Stanford Handbook for Language Engineers, ed. Ali
Farghali (Stanford, Calif: CSLI Publications, 2002), 12
What do these imprecisions mean for our methods of
search, discovery, analysis?
Is ‘mechanical analysis’ of email the best means of
conducting research with email archives?

Outlook: Email Archives , 1990-2007

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