Towards privacy-aware exploration of archived personal emails

Abstract

This paper examines how privacy measures, such as anonymisation and aggregation processes for email collections, can affect the perceived usefulness of email visualisations for research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The work is intended to inform archivists and data managers who are faced with the challenge of accessioning and reviewing increasingly sizeable and complex personal digital collections. The research in this paper provides a focused user study to investigate the usefulness of data visualisation as a mediator between privacy-aware management of data and maximisation of research value of data. The research is carried out with researchers and archivists with vested interest in using, making sense of, and/or archiving the data to derive meaningful results. Participants tend to perceive email visualisations as useful, with an average rating of 4.281 (out of 7) for all the visualisations in the study, with above average ratings for mountain graphs and word trees. The study shows that while participants voice a strong desire for information identifying individuals in email data, they perceive visualisations as almost equally useful for their research and/or work when aggregation is employed in addition to anonymisation.