Email Archives Research Articles

DESIGN PROCESS MODELLING TO MEASURE ENGINEERING PRODUCTIVITY IN BUILDING DESIGN

AbstractA multi-domain Matrix (MDM) is used to identify and analyse rework loops within the Building Design (BD) process caused by building regulations. To model this process, we used information from official documents, plans of work, email archives, and anecdotal evidence as a case study. Findings reveal that MDM can identify the rework loops caused by building regulations, this information forms the basis to improve current BD processes. The complexity of the rework loop including the processes, people and, deliverables involved in the rework loop is also identified. Further analysis can also use the MDM to estimate the costs incurred with each rework cycle. This MDM can also identify rework loops in other engineering design processes due to design changes.This study is part of a PhD project exploring engineering productivity in the construction industry using DRM. The results present an MDM that provides situation-specific insight, offering areas of process improvement, and support through engineering productivity measurement. This is one of the few studies that models rework loops in the BD process caused by regulations.

More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives

ABSTRACT The overall aim of this article is to push for access to born-digital archives, including email archives. It argues that the digital revolution has led to huge changes, but it also brought us back to an earlier situation. The world of big (digital) data is not so different from the world of big (paper) data. There is a danger of repeating the mistakes that were made in the twentieth century with large paper archives, which have often remained uncataloged, hidden, and inaccessible to users. The first section looks at the impact of the More Product, Less Process (MPLP) movement on archival repositories over the past fifteen years. Originally conceived as a response to the huge increase in paper records and uncataloged collections, MPLP has been increasingly applied to digitized collections to increase access. However, few institutions have applied MPLP to born-digital collections, and accessibility remains a huge problem. In the next section, this article presents the kind of research that can be done once access to these born-digital collections is achieved. The final section examines the MPLP approach in relation to artificial intelligence/machine learning.

Discovering Organizational Hierarchy through a Corporate Ranking Algorithm: The Enron Case

This paper proposes the CorpRank algorithm to extract social hierarchies from electronic communication data. The algorithm computes a ranking score for each user as a weighted combination of the number of emails, the number of responses, average response time, clique scores, and several degree and centrality measures. The algorithm uses principal component analysis to calculate the weights of the features. This score ranks users according to their importance, and its output is used to reconstruct an organization chart. We illustrate the algorithm over real‐world data using the Enron corporation’s e‐mail archive. Compared to the actual corporate work chart, compensation lists, judicial proceedings, and analyzing the major players involved, the results show promise.

Finding light in dark archives: using AI to connect context and content in email

Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part of this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails’ network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience.

The digital footprint of innovators: Using email to detect the most creative people in your organization

We propose a novel method for finding the most innovative people in an organization, using email to analyze structure and dynamics of the organization’s online communication. To illustrate our approach, we analyzed the email archive of 2000 members of the R&D department of a US multinational company. We use metrics of social network analysis extended with meta-data of interaction dynamics to calculate features for individual employees: their network positions, messages sent and received, pings to others and response times. We find a distinction between innovation group leaders and subject matter experts focused on publishing papers and patents. Innovation administrators have a higher number of direct contacts, are more committed in conversations and receive more messages than they send. We also found significant differences between innovators oriented towards internal awards and innovators more concerned with external recognition of their work.

E-Mail as Legacy: Managing and Preserving E-Mail as a Collection

This article discusses how e-mail and e-mail archives can serve as legacy for individuals, families, and societies. Toward this end, it outlines the scope and scale of e-mail as a tool and a task, and gives an overview of the many individual, group, and institutional factors in e-mail management that influence the form and contents of e-mail archives. Finally, drawing on the authors' experiences and observations as personal information management (PIM) researchers, the article discusses e-mail management practices, makes recommendations for effective e-mail management, and suggests future research topics that span library and information studies.

‘See Me as I see Myself:’ A Phenomenological Analysis of Grade Bump Requests

At the end of every semester, some students will boldly email me asking for their grade to be bumped. These requests and their motives seem closely tied to academic entitlement, which has mostly been studied quantitatively. Creating a dialogue with this published literature, this research seeks to uncover the lived meanings of a grade perceived as unjust. Using a Heideggerian life-world approach, I analyzed an email archive to explore how students are projecting lived understandings of themselves that are at odds with their grades. In their plaintive plea to change their grades, the students are seeking affirmation of their self-understanding, demanding to be seen and valued as they see themselves. These results are discussed in light of the literature reviewed and directions for future research are proffered.

Negotiating the born-digital: a problem of search

ABSTRACTContemporary approaches to the investigation of digital resources are dominated by the paradigm of free-form natural language search, popularised by Google. The Google form of searching has shaped our view of digital possibilities and profoundly affects our search and research habits. Yet in early pioneering work which led to the digital revolution of the 1990s, search was not a major consideration and there was a stronger emphasis on linking files. With the rise of very large born-digital resources such as e-mail archives, Wikileak dumps and web archives, the limitations of Google-type searching are becoming more evident. This paper reviews the limitations of search in exploring born-digital archives and starts to sketch out possible approaches to an alternative. It is suggested that a return to digital roots, by renewing the interest of pioneers such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in the linking of files, may provide one approach to born-digital archives.

Finding top performers through email patterns analysis

In the information economy, individuals’ work performance is closely associated with their digital communication strategies. This study combines social network and semantic analysis to develop a method to identify top performers based on email communication. By reviewing existing literature, we identified the indicators that quantify email communication into measurable dimensions. To empirically examine the predictive power of the proposed indicators, we collected 2 million email archive of 578 executives in an international service company. Panel regression was employed to derive interpretable association between email indicators and top performance. The results suggest that top performers tend to assume central network positions and have high responsiveness to emails. In email contents, top performers use more positive and complex language, with low emotionality, but rich in influential words that are probably reused by co-workers. To better explore the predictive power of the email indicators, we employed AdaBoost machine learning models, which achieved 83.56% accuracy in identifying top performers. With cluster analysis, we further find three categories of top performers, ‘networkers’ with central network positions, ‘influencers’ with influential ideas and ‘positivists’ with positive sentiments. The findings suggest that top performers have distinctive email communication patterns, laying the foundation for grounding email communication competence in theory. The proposed email analysis method also provides a tool to evaluate the different types of individual communication styles.

The Future of Email Archives: A Report from the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives

The Future of Email Archives: A Report from the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives

Autobiographical recall of personally familiar names and temporal information in e-mails: An automatic analytic approach using e-mail communications.

An important question that arises from autobiographical memory research is whether the variables that influence memory in the laboratory also drive memory for autobiographical episodes in real life. We explored this question within the context of e-mail communications and investigated the variables that influence recall for personally familiar names and temporal information in e-mails. We designed a Web-based program that analyzed each participant's year-old sent e-mail archive and applied textual analysis algorithms to identify a set of sentences likely to be memorable. These sentences were then used as the stimuli in a cued recall task. Participants saw two sentences from their sent e-mail as a cue and attempted to recall the name of the e-mail recipient. Participants also rated the vividness of recall for the e-mail conversation and estimated the month in which they had written the e-mail. Linear mixed-effect analyses revealed that recipient name recall accuracy decreased with longer retention intervals and increased with greater frequency of contact with the recipient. Also, with longer retention intervals, participants dated e-mails as being more recent than their actual month. This telescoping error was moderately larger for e-mails with greater sentiment. These findings suggest that memory for personally familiar names and temporal information in e-mails closely follows the patterns for autobiographical memory and proper-name recall found in laboratory settings. This study introduces an innovative, Web-based experimental method forstudying the cognitive processes related to autobiographical memories using ecologically valid, naturalistic communications.

You have not been archiving emails for no reason! Using big data analytics to cluster B2B interest in products and services and link clusters to financial performance

The potential of big data analytics when it comes to gaining business insights, such as market trends and consumer preferences, has captured the interest of both scholars and business practitioners. However, the extant literature has so far provided limited empirical evidence to demonstrate how big data analytics can create business value. To address this research gap, this paper followed a novel big data analytical approach that involved analysing email archives about product/services demand clusters in a B2B setting. We analysed 621 k emails exchanged between 2009 and 2018. We identified a number of discussion clusters that were considered proxies for the interest buyers expressed in the products/services on offer. These clusters and associated discussion trends were linked to the company's revenues and financial performance, showing good predictive power. In doing this, we have demonstrated how widely available data, such as emails, which all companies have, can be used to underpin new methods for the early identification and monitoring of product demand trends, informing marketing strategies.

Fostering work engagement in geographically-dispersed and asynchronous virtual teams

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that enable work engagement to develop when asynchronous communication is used in virtual team (VT) projects.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative approach, a longitudinal study of an eight-month long VT project was carried out. Data collected included an extensive e-mail archive, project documentation, observation of team meetings and interviews with project members and leaders.FindingsThe findings show that VT leaders can actively promote work engagement through the effective use of resources along with appropriate practices that foster its development. They can also sustain and nourish work engagement throughout the different phases of the VT lifecycle project.Research limitations/implicationsThe study has examined work engagement in asynchronous mediated settings. Future work should involve studying the effect of synchronous communications on work engagement within VTs.Practical implicationsOrganizations that are interested in promoting effective virtual work practices need to train VT managers on how to keep VT members engaged throughout the various phases of the VT project.Social implicationsIt is posited that developing work engagement is not a one-off practice, but instead, requires ongoing effort that should be evident and supported across the different phases of the VT lifecycle.Originality/valueThis paper forwards an important debate on work engagement in alternative, non-permanent, work settings.

Automatic Discovery of Design Task Structure Using Deep Belief Nets

With the arrival of cyber physical world and an extensive support of advanced information technology (IT) infrastructure, nowadays it is possible to obtain the footprints of design activities through emails, design journals, change logs, and different forms of social data. In order to manage a more effective design process, it is essential to learn from the past by utilizing these valuable sources and understand, for example, what design tasks are actually carried out, their interactions, and how they impact each other. In this paper, a computational approach based on the deep belief nets (DBN) is proposed to automatically uncover design tasks and quantify their interactions from design document archives. First, a DBN topic model with real-valued units is developed to learn a set of intrinsic topic features from a simple word-frequency-based input representation. The trained DBN model is then utilized to discover design tasks by unfolding hidden units by sets of strongly connected words, followed by estimating the interactions among tasks on the basis of their co-occurrence frequency in a hidden topic space. Finally, the proposed approach is demonstrated through a real-life case study using a design email archive spanning for more than 2 yr.

Effectiveness of standards consortia: Social network perspectives

With the rapid assimilation of e-business capabilities into generally accepted business practices, there has been a rush to ensure standards exist to allow for seamless integration and interfaces between all the concerned parties. While standards consortia have grown in number and importance in the private sector over the past decade, little is known about how effective standards consortia are in addressing the needs for developing e-business standards. The current study examines the relationships between task characteristics of e-business standards and group effectiveness of standards consortia in terms of group centralization, group cohesiveness, and group diversity. We took a case study approach and analyze email archives from the ebXML standards efforts using social network analysis techniques. The findings of the study indicate that the expanding nature of e-business standards and a broader participation of IT vendor and users must be considered in order to improve group effectiveness of standards consortia. Managerial implications of the findings are discussed.

Correspondence as a documentary form, its persistent representation, and email management, preservation, and access

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to construct a systematic way of thinking about correspondence as a documentary form and discuss the role its persistent representation features play in management, preservation and access of email correspondence. Design/methodology/approach – Using the method of diplomatic analysis as a guiding theory, the paper conducts a historical review of correspondence recordkeeping and email systems in the American context, analyzes the evolution of its persistent representation features and discusses the implications on current email management and archival practices. Findings – Correspondence as a document form and its persistent representation features have played an important role in traditional correspondence recordkeeping and electronic mail management. The design of systems to manage, preserve and access email records should reflect the characteristics and functionality of email records, capable of retaining email correspondence as a documentary form supported by its persistent representation features. Research limitations/implications – The research in this paper mostly covers secondary sources with a regional focus. The analysis covers important historical developments in correspondence and email recordkeeping and archival practices. The study uses examples of email archives available online, and further research can be developed when more email archival collections are processed and constructed. Originality/value – A systematic analysis of persistent representation of traditional correspondence and electronic mail provides a useful perspective to reflect on the characteristics of correspondence as a document form and offers some food for thought for records management and archival professionals and assists them in developing systems to better manage, preserve and provide access to email correspondence.

Recognizing Communication Patterns in Chronic Care Innovation Networks

In this paper we describe a methodology to measure communication behaviors in innovation teams. We collected data over two years by mining email communication archives and applied the methodology to study innovation teams working to re-design the delivery of care for chronically ill children. We used social network analysis and sentiment analysis to calculate network metrics such as group density, group betweenness centrality, actor betweenness centrality, average weighted variance in contribution index, and emotionality ratio. We administered surveys to senior leaders to assess their perception of teams’ performance. We conducted “virtual mirroring” sessions with teams to share preliminary results. This paper explores the associations between performance, network density and average weighted variance in contribution index. Our preliminary findings show that high-performing teams tend to interact in less close-knit networks characterized by lower network density and a more balanced exchange of information among team members.

Cloudsweeper and data-centric security

Most security online is binary, where being authorized to access a system allows complete access to the requested resource. This binary system amplifies the harm of giving access to an unauthorized individual and motivates system designers to strengthen access control mechanisms to the point where they become so strong as to be nearly insurmountable for illegitimate and legitimate users alike. As a result, Internet users are required to jump through several hoops to access their data: ever longer passwords, multiple authentication factors, or time consuming CAPTCHAs. Users must always provide strong proof of their identity, regardless of whether they want to check their email for something as innocuous as a movie time or as serious as a medical test result. Not surprisingly, users often disable or refuse to use these tedious security options [2, 5, 7]. Users may be better served by a data-centric approach to security, where systems are sensitive to the differing security needs of data, even within a single account or collection. A data-centric approach can apply strong security only when the data being protected warrants it, while allowing users a less encumbered experience the majority of the time. Machine learning techniques can automate the detection of sensitive information, freeing users from the tedious task of sorting their data into low and high security categories. With less friction involved in securing their data, users may be more likely to use strong security where available, resulting in a more secure Internet for everyone. We present Cloudsweeper , a tool that applies a data-centric approach to security to the specific case of plain text password sharing in Gmail accounts. Cloudsweeper detects and applies an additional layer of encryption to plain text passwords in a user's email account, while allowing the user to access the rest of their email archive as normal. Public use of Cloudsweeper shows that such a data-centric approach to securing data can be an effective way of providing users more security while still being acceptably convenient.

Rapid response: Email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia

After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh's coastal communities. This article presents a medical humanitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while working for a large aid agency in post-conflict Aceh from 2005 to 2007. In December 2005, the agency faced the first test of its medical and negotiation capacities to provide psychiatric care to a recently amnestied political prisoner whose erratic behavior upon returning home led to his re-arrest and detention at a district police station. I juxtapose two methodological approaches—an ethnographic content analysis of the agency's email archive and field-based participant-observation—to recount contrasting narrative versions of the event. I use this contrast to illustrate and critique the immediacy of the humanitarian imperative that characterizes the industry. Immediacy is explored as both an urgent moral impulse to assist in a crisis and a form of mediation that seemingly projects neutral and transparent transmission of content. I argue that the sense of immediacy afforded by email enacts and amplifies the humanitarian imperative at the cost of abstracting elite humanitarian actors out of local and moral context. As a result, the management and mediation of this psychiatric case by email produced a bureaucratic model of care that failed to account for complex conditions of chronic political and medical instability on the ground.

Analysis of e-mail Communication Using a Social Network Framework for Crisis Detection in an Organization

The e-mails exchanged, as an indicator of information exchange in an organization, is used to facilitate the emergence of structure within the organization. In this paper, we infer the formal hierarchy and also detect the informal networks in the context of organizational e-mail archives from a social network perspective. We explore the performance of the social network based classifier and the evolutions of informal networks over time to better understand the interplay between communication patterns and major events within an organization like Enron. Prediction accuracy of the social network classifier delineates the normal and crisis periods in an organization. We found that the study of informal networks along with the structural hierarchy can provide a clue to the health of the corporate.