On Message with Ben Gross

Infosthetics has some excellent pointers to graphical approaches to understanding email conversations:

email thread visualization

a data visualization technique that displays threads found in email. it combines the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread. people can observe various attributes of conversations & find relevant messages easily.
the Thread Arcs have a linear layout of message nodes connected by relationship arcs. each circular node represents a message in the thread. each arc connects each message node to its parent in the thread. colors denotes time, contributor, or image generation.
see also email content visualization & email erosion & email mountain.
[ibm.com & ibm.com(pdf)]

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