Email metadata
Some folks at the MIT Media Lab have put together a simple web app that takes your Gmail headers and builds a social network.
Once you log in, Immersion will use only the From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails in the account you are signing in with. It will not access the subject or the body content of any of your emails.
Here’s mine, from my University of Washington email (with the names blurred, not that communicating with me is all that incriminating)
Obviously my email headers reveal who I email, and, unsurprisingly, the little outlying clusters are small groups or individuals involved in specific projects. More interesting is how the main clump breaks down: the blue and pink circles are statisticians, the red are epidemiology and genomics people that I have worked with in person in Seattle, and the green are epidemiology and genomics people that I work with only via email.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »