Understanding email communication patterns

Abstract

It has been almost two decades since the beginning of the web. This means that the web is no longer just a technology of the present, but also, a record of our past. Email, one of the original forms of social media, is even older than the web and contains a detailed description of our personal and professional history. This thesis explores the world of email communication by introducing Immersion, a tool build for the purposes to analyze and visualize the information hidden behind the digital traces of email activity, to help us reflect on our actions, learn something new, quantify it, and hopefully make us react and change our behavior. In closing, I look over the email overload problem and work-life balance trends by quantifying general email usage using a large real-world email dataset.