My Email Inbox

I should be spending more time studying for this stupid test I have to take in May. But screwing around with free network software is much more interesting. In a bid to convince myself that I have a social life, I used NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL) to extract my emails from the past 4 years and was able to draw this cool picture in UCINET 6 (http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/). The software extracts all emails sent to and from me and connects them also through persons CC’d to reconstruct a vast communication network of school and personal emails, spam for academic seminars, football ticket postings and people just writing to complain.  The red dot in the center left is, of course, myself. Colored dots represent distinct groups based on their level of connectedness, most of which represent particular departments that I happened to communicate in, or open mailing lists (hence my mentioning of football tickets sales). Most everyone has sent mail to me only and not cc’d anyone else. Thus, there’s a lot of isolates (people with only one or fewer connections), but the high level of overall connectedness was surprising. Mostly, though, I should get my ass to work.