Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Mining Mailboxes: Analyzing Who’s Talking to Whom About What, How Often, and More

Mail archives are arguably the ultimate kind of social web data and the basis of the earliest online social networks. Mail data is ubiquitous, and each message is inherently social, involving conversations and interactions among two or more people. Furthermore, each message consists of human language data that’s inherently expressive, and is laced with structured metadata fields that anchor the human language data in particular timespans and unambiguous identities. Mining mailboxes certainly provides an opportunity to synthesize all of the concepts you’ve learned in previous chapters and opens up incredible opportunities for discovering valuable insights.

Whether you are the CIO of a corporation and want to analyze corporate communications for trends and patterns, you have a keen interest in mining online mailing lists for insights, or you’d simply like to explore your own mailbox for patterns as part of quantifying yourself, the following discussion provides a primer to help you get started. This chapter introduces some fundamental tools and techniques for exploring mailboxes to answer questions such as:

• Who sends mail to whom (and how much/often)?

• Is there a particular time of the day (or day of the week) when the most mail chatter happens?

• Which people send the most messages to one another?

• What are the subjects of the liveliest discussion threads?

Although social media sites ...