E-mail May Not Reflect The Social Network

This paper aims to demonstrate that ties obtained by mining e-mails archives do not necessarily provide a complete and realistic approximation of interactions by other communication media. The results of our project indicate that factors such as co-location and the nature of working relationships influence the preference for face-to-face interactions and chat. Peers who are co-located and who are working on the same project are more likely to use synchronous media rather than email. By adopting a social network approach we compared the complete networks implied by four different media (e-mail, face-to-face, chat and phone), measuring network properties like betweeness centrality, density, and core/periphery structure, in order to identify at what extent the network implied by e-mail differs from the network based on other communication media.