Using Email-Based Network Analysis to Determine Awareness Foci

摘要

A number of studies have indicated that awareness of others' activities plays an important part in collaboration. Consequently, awareness has been a frequent theme in cooperative work research. Researchers have acknowledged that proximity has a strong effect on collaboration, and that maintaining awareness of peers becomes harder in distributed environments. Many awareness systems require configuration by the user and work only in predefined shared environments. In this paper, we present an investigation into the determination of awareness targets, through email-based user interaction analysis. The final goal is to be able to draw inferences as to who and what a user would be interested in maintaining awareness of, enabling a system to automatically determine awareness foci and adjust itself according to its user.