@article {17480, title = {Using rhythms of relationships to understand e-mail archives}, journal = {Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology}, volume = {57}, year = {2006}, month = {2006/12/01/}, pages = {1936 - 1948}, abstract = {Due to e-mail{\textquoteright}s ubiquitous nature, millions of users are intimate with the technology; however, most users are only familiar with managing their own e-mail, which is an inherently different task from exploring an e-mail archive. Historians and social scientists believe that e-mail archives are important artifacts for understanding the individuals and communities they represent. To understand the conversations evidenced in an archive, context is needed. In this article, we present a new way to gain this necessary context: analyzing the temporal rhythms of social relationships. We provide methods for constructing meaningful rhythms from the e-mail headers by identifying relationships and interpreting their attributes. With these visualization techniques, e-mail archive explorers can uncover insights that may have been otherwise hidden in the archive. We apply our methods to an individual{\textquoteright}s 15-year e-mail archive, which consists of about 45,000 messages and over 4,000 relationships.}, isbn = {1532-2890}, doi = {10.1002/asi.20387}, url = {http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.20387/abstract}, author = {Perer,Adam and Shneiderman, Ben and Oard, Douglas} }