Visualising Collaboration: Qualitative Analysis of an Email Visualisation Case Study

Abstract

This paper reports on continuing work on visualising email collaboration (O.A. Puade and T.G. Wyeld, 2006). It reports on the re- interviewing of participants of a previous email collaboration visualisation study regarding the identification of key players. Participants were asked to comment on the finding of key player impact on the collaboration as determined by our analysis and methods. We found, while they mostly agreed with our analysis they expressed reservations regarding the methods used. This forms the ground work for yet further work in developing a real-time visualisation tool for email-mediated collaboration. The qualitative analysis case-study method used in this study helped gain a deeper understanding of the nature and characteristic of the collaboration that would otherwise have been hidden in a quantitative analysis.