Email conversation network analysis: Work groups and teams in organizations

Email communication is a source of important information, much of which is at first sight hidden. This paper presents an analytical tool that was created to analyze the deeper relationships in the email data. Those include relationships based on an interaction of multiple users in a team. The analytical methods proposed and described in this paper are based on two factors. The first factor is the context, which is a group of multiple users in combination with terms used in the communication. The second factor is the time interval in which the communication was conducted. Based on these factors, we analyze the conversations that take place and get results that are in several different forms presented to the users. The paper presents methods for weighting conversations, users and relationships, as well as methods for finding communities associated with the specified context. Additionally, the concept of the explorative user interface is introduced.