MAS 963 · Designing Sociable Media
Instructor: Judith Donath

11.19 · Looking at email

readings

• Donath, J. (draft) Visualizing email archives
• Ducheneaut, N. and Bellotti, V. (2001). Email as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management. Interactions , 8(5), pp. 30-38.
• Whittaker, S., Jones, Q., and Terveen, L. (in press). Contact Management: Identifying Contacts to Support Long Term Communication. To appear in Proceedings of Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM Press.

assignment  

Read the papers.

Discuss them in an essay using these questions as a starting point:

How do you think email archives can be used to create personal histories? Do you think the significance of particular emails is cmoputationally accessible or does it require human interpretation? What makes particular emails or patterns of email significant? What are the potential personal and social functions of a visualized email archive? What are some ways of classifying one's contacts? Are these overlapping categories? hierarchical categories? do they change over time? 

Sketch a design for an email based contact management interface. How does it deal with evolving relationships over time?

Also, please be prepared to discuss your ideas for a final project. You need not have made a final decion about what project to do - this is your chance to run some ideas by me and the rest of the class.

Please submit the URL of your critique and sketch online by Tuesday evening.