EmailMap: Visualizing Event Evolution and Contact Interaction within Email Archives

Email archives contain rich information about how we interact with different contacts and how events evolve throughout time. Making sense of the archived messages can be a good way to understand how things evolved and progressed in the past. Although much work has been devoted to email visualization, most work has focused on presenting one of the two aspects of email archives: discovering the evolution of emails and events, or the relationship between the email owner and his/her contacts over time. In this paper, we present Email Map, an email visualization which integrates the information of both events and contacts into a single view, enabling users to make sense of their email archives with complementary contextual information. Two visualization components are designed to portray complex information within the email archives: event flow and contact tracks. The event flow illustrates the evolution of past events, helping the users to grasp high-level pictures and patterns of their email archives. The contact tracks reveal the interaction between the email owner and his/her contacts.