Visual Discovery of Communication Patterns in Email Networks

In the age of social networks, it is very popular to analyze Twitter and Facebook to detect relationships and communities and to discover how information flows between groups. However, both Facebook and Twitter are examples of “performed” social networks: because a user has full control over who he or she “friends” or “follows,” he can artificially create a persona that he wishes the outside world to perceive him as. In fact, it has been well-studied that expressions of taste typically exclude the most critical groups to communication flows, and that social networks are merely the expressions of performed taste [9].