AMY E MARTIN // Thesis

I don't have any yet, but that's one of about a bajillion places I'm starting with in my investigations for my thesis. Email is a deeply researched topic. On the one hand, that is fantastic because there's a huge amount of data to pull from. On the other hand, it's daunting. A few hours of basic research led to sixty relevant and/or interesting articles... many from academia or the internal research groups of large corporations. It's great that all this work is done but it also makes me wonder about my ability to contribute to it.

I can, however, live with that low-level anxiety and live with the aftermath if I don't contribute anything mind-blowing. What I wanted to talk about specifically was all the kinds of email data visualizations that people have come up with. The primary ones that I knew about before going into this project are Christopher Baker's personal email map and the visualization aspects of Remail. I get those, what they're doing and why, but I can't replicate them. Nor can I replicate them with my own data.

So. Quickly searching for "gmail api" brought me to mail trends. I started it half an hour ago and it's still processing all my gmail. I have 55,783 messages. I'm not entirely sure when I started using gmail exclusively for everything but I certainly have not used it since I started using email in 1995. I remember a time when nearly all my email was directed to me personally and almost entirely from strangers. It was also on a pc and maybe in Eudora. Or maybe it was in Pine, sorted with procmail. A handful of Elm messages from University. I wonder what my total number of emails sent and received would be. 100,000? 500,000? Strange and unfathomable.

Labels: everything else, random ideas