Mapping Your Email

Between 1998 and now Christopher Baker accumulated 60,000 emails, which, at something like 20 a day isn’t an unreasonable number. He knew that in that mine lay information that would show him the shifting relationships between him and his correspondents across the decade, and he also knew that it would be difficult, not to mention tedious, to assess these by reading the archive. Instead, he designed a custom program that illustrated the networks graphically. You can see this in a Flash movie demonstrating his program.

This is, for me, paradigmatic of what computers are about: processing great quantitites of data and presenting it all in a way that lets you discover the links, densities and discontinuities — the meaning, more or less. I’d like to mine my email archive in this way, and the files on my hard drive, and all my posts on Slaw, and…