IMMERSION : a platform for visualization and temporal analysis of email data

Abstract

Visual narratives of our lives enable us to reflect upon our past relationships, collaborations and significant life events. Additionally, they can also serve as digital archives, thus making it possible for others to access, learn from and reflect upon our life's trajectory long after we are gone. In this thesis, I propose and develop a webbased platform called Immersion, which reveals the network of relationships woven by a person over time and also the significant events in their life. Using only metadata from a person's email history, Immersion creates a visual account of their life that they can interactively explore for self-reflection or share it with others as a digital archive. In the first part of this thesis, I discuss the design, technical and privacy aspects of Immersion, lessons learnt from its large-scale deployment and the reactions it elicited from people. In the second part of this thesis, I focus on the technical anatomy of a new feature of Immersion called Storyline - an interactive timeline of significant life events detected from a person's email metadata. This feature is inspired by feedback obtained from people after the initial launch of the platform.