Do you ever wonder how much the metadata gathered in your inbox reveals about you? Quite often, judging by what researchers at the MIT Media Lab have managed to achieve with the tool they have called Immersion. They’ve built a web app that — once you grant it permission to do so as shown below it will dig through your email history to piece together a “people-centric view of your email life.”
What does Immersion look at, exactly?
For starters, only the senders, recipients (including those CC’d), and timestamps within your email archives. It steers clear of subject lines and the actual bodies of your messages. The results you get finally are impressive depending on how much Immersion has to work with. What first appears to be a random list of people you’ve contacted is actually linked together in logical ways. Note that, this will depend largely on how far back your email trail goes.
“All of this data is about people. Data basically doesn’t make sense without humans .When you see it all together, it is, in a way, an out-of-body experience. ”
Don’t expect the holy grail of emotions when using the tool, but Immersion will some what succeed in showing that, even with less information like metadata, when collected in bulk, you can visualize the relationships contained within. If you feel like you want to try it out feel free to click the source link below.
Source: MIT
