%0 Journal Article %J Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology %D 2006 %T Using rhythms of relationships to understand e‐mail archives %A Perer,Adam %A Shneiderman, Ben %A Oard, Douglas %X Due to e-mail'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's 15-year e-mail archive, which consists of about 45,000 messages and over 4,000 relationships. %B Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology %V 57 %P 1936 - 1948 %8 2006/12/01/ %@ 1532-2890 %G eng %U http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.20387/abstract %N 14 %R 10.1002/asi.20387