CHLOE MARTEN
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
12 02 2018
Assignment 3: Dear Data Visualization, link to assignment
For my Dear Data project, I tracked the amount of work emails I RECEIVED this week and what I did with them. As far as tracking, I let Gmail do all the work, and then at the end of the week I reviewed all the emails I received since February 4th. I decided to bucket the emails based on how I handled them, resulting in 5 categories.
- Responded
- Yet to Respond
- Document Sharing / Informative (items needed for work)
- Ignored
- Trashed
I then tallied up the number of email chains per category. I did not count individual emails as the overall chain was representative of how I handled it. While grouping the emails, I also marked who the email was from: internal person, external person, and my immediate team.
After gathering all my inbox data, I set out to visualize it. I initially wanted to represent each email chain with an actual email icon, but realized early on that I would not have enough space. Afterall, there were a total of 155 emails to represent. I landed on using lines to signify an email chain, similar to how I did my initial tallying. To represent the email categories, I used 5 different colors: Red (Responded), Yellow (Yet to Respond), Green (Document Sharing/Informative), Blue (Ignored), and Grey (Trashed). To represent the who, I used an open circle for External, filled circle for Internal, and a star for a teammate.
In looking back at my visualization, I was surprised to see how many emails I actively ignore. It was also interesting to see the number of document sharing emails, comparatively. I would hypothesize this is due to working at a larger, older organization that hasn't picked up other tools for collaboration. I think if I were to do the same analysis at the startup I worked at previously, it would be much less as we used mostly Slack and Jira to share and discuss files.
Thanks for your insights and thoughtfulness. The visualization you made is accessible and readable - they do say bar charts are among the easiest to read and comprehend. It is pretty surprising to see how much internal email is thrown around, especially relative to the external mails. Also you do a great job responding to messages - kudos!
Interesting would be to also sort on a temporal scale what your email is doing. I guess the advantage of doing a project programmatically is to be able to quickly look at your data in these different forms.
Sidenote: there’s certainly upsides and downsides of using things like Slack or other chat programs at work. Though I found that I had a harder time filtering out the noise from the signals in the Slack-verse. Emails also create clutter, but it feels more deliberate when ignoring or deleting. I wonder what a visualization would look like of the “stuff” your missed or consumed using a chat program.