E-Mail as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations

Authors: Tyler, Joshua; Wilkinson, Dennis; Huberman, Bernardo

Source: The Information Society, Volume 21, Number 2, Number 2/April-June 2005 , pp. 143-153(11)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

We describe a method for the automatic identification of communities of practice from e-mail logs within an organization. We use a betweenness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an initial e-mail corpus of nearly 1 million messages collected over a 2-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. These studies are complemented by a qualitative evaluation of the results in the field.

Keywords: communities of practice; e-mail; e-mail communities; informal leadership; qualitative methods; social networks

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01972240590925348

Affiliations: 1: HP Labs, Palo Alto, California, USA

Publication date: 2005-04-01

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