Mining the Social Web

mbox + CouchDB = Relaxed Email Analysis

Using the right tool for the job can significantly streamline the effort involved in analyzing data. While the most obvious approach for analyzing the structured data might be to spend some extra time creating an a priori schema, importing data into it, modifying the schema because there’s something we forgot about, and then repeating the process yet a few more times, this surely wouldn’t be a very relaxing^[14] thing to do. Given the very natural mapping between the document-centric nature of an email message and a JSON data structure, we’ll import our mbox data into CouchDB, a document-oriented database that provides map/reduce capabilities that are quite nice for building up indexes on the data and performing an aggregate frequency analysis that answers questions such as, “How many messages were sent by so-and-so?” or “How many messages were sent out on such-and-such a date?”

Note

A full-blown discussion about CouchDB, where it fits into the overall data storage landscape, and many of its other unique capabilities outside the ones most germane to basic analysis is outside the scope of this book. However, it should be straightforward enough to follow along with this section even if you’ve never heard of CouchDB before.

Another nice benefit of using CouchDB for the task of document analysis is that it provides an entirely REST-based interface that you can integrate into any web-based architecture, as well as trivial-to-use replication capabilities ...