Dynamic coordinated email visualization

Abstract

Many computer users receive hundreds (if not thousands) of emails per week; users often keep these emails and have many years of personal emails archived: users use their stored emails to manage appointments, to-do lists, and store useful information. In this paper we present an interactive email visualization tool (Mailview) that utilizes filter and coordination techniques to explore this archived data. The tool enables users to analyze and visualize hundreds of stored emails, it displays the emails on time-dependent plots enabling users to observe trends over time and perceive emails with similar features. Interaction is an important aspect of finding meaning within information, hence the tool utilizes focus+context views, dynamic filters, detail-on-demand techniques and coordinated views, finally, we discuss various methods that enable the system to be designed such that it can display hundreds of objects at interactive rates.