Express Mail installation at Infotecture, Artists Space Gallery

Express Mail is a trio of email pieces from the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, including the Social Network Fragments collaboration between danah boyd and BuddyGraph. See the SNF/BuddyGraph Collaboration page to download a copy of the Visualizer as shown in the gallery.

Social Network Fragments uses an individual's email spool to construct interactive self-portraits. These portraits focus on the social networks and email interaction behavior of the subject. For Infotecture, we present two self-portraits, one of each of the artists - danah boyd and Jeff Potter. By presenting both of their portraits, we hope to highlight the differences and similarities in their communication patterns and personal networks.

Both portraits show five years worth of email interaction. The names on the screen are the most prominent people in danah/Jeff's social network - friends, colleagues, family members, etc. Based on looking at messages with multiple recipients, people are placed near the people that they share email with, far away from those whom they may not know. This layout allows the viewer to quickly see the social clusters in danah/Jeff's social network. Names are colored based on the context in which they know danah/Jeff and the other people in their network (i.e. school, work, family, etc.). The brightness and font size relate to the quantity of conversations with danah/Jeff and others in the system. The portrait evolves over time, allowing the viewer to see how the social network patterns change. By default, the right side of the portrait shows danah/Jeff's patterns over the entire five years, where the boxes show the magnitude of their interactions along various axes (awareness of the individuals through shared messages and knowledge of the individuals through direct email contact). The portrait is also interactive, allowing you to explore different regions by zooming (click and drag a box in the area of interest), highlight particular individuals (click on their name), and change the current time period (click on one of the boxes on the right). When you highlight an individual, their interactions over the entire time span are shown on the right.

The purpose of this project is to give individuals a way to explore their own patterns and behaviors, friendship networks and social clustering habits. It allows for self-reflection and awareness and often highlights unexpected social connections between friends that the subject did not realize had formed. While Social Network Fragments is primarily intended for personal use, the self-portraits shown at Infotecture reveal the power of these images, even to those who don't know the stories behind the person's social behaviors.