21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox | FlowingData

Description

Email has grown to be a huge part of our lives and is very much commonplace. We can connect with others in just a few clicks. With all the email sent per day, how can we understand these connections? How can we visualize the type of email we've been sending? Can we tell a story somehow with the thousands of emails we've sent, received, and deleted?
These 21 email visualizations investigate. I've split them up into six categories - exploratory, analytic, mapping, metaphor, networks, and abstract.
Exploratory
We almost always think of email in list-form - read, unread, spam - but here are a group of visualizations that show you email differently and encourage users to explore their inbox.
Mountain
It's the mountain of email by Fernanda Viegas from the IBM group.
[http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/projects/mountain/]
Enron Explorer
I posted about this in 6 Influential Datasets that Changed the Way We Think [http://flowingdata.com/2008/01/24/6-influential-datasets-that-changed-the-way-we-think/]. When did Enron start going under?
[http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/]
Themail
Themail splits your emails into keywords and phrases.

Contrasting Portraits


Analytic
How can we look at email from a quantitative perspective?
Rhythms of Relationships

Dynamic Coordinated Email

Mapping
Email mysteriously floats around in some network, but here are some maps that try to attach location to our messages.
Small World Email Networks

Original URL

http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/19/21-ways-to-visualize-and-explore-your-email-inbox/

http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/19/21-ways-to-visualize-and-explore-your-email-inbox/