Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/315000 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Citation: 
[Journal:] International Journal on Digital Libraries [ISSN:] 1432-1300 [Volume:] 25 [Issue:] 4 [Publisher:] Springer [Place:] Berlin, Heidelberg [Year:] 2024 [Pages:] 729-763
Publisher: 
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
This paper examines how privacy measures, such as anonymisation and aggregation processes for email collections, can affect the perceived usefulness of email visualisations for research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The work is intended to inform archivists and data managers who are faced with the challenge of accessioning and reviewing increasingly sizeable and complex personal digital collections. The research in this paper provides a focused user study to investigate the usefulness of data visualisation as a mediator between privacy-aware management of data and maximisation of research value of data. The research is carried out with researchers and archivists with vested interest in using, making sense of, and/or archiving the data to derive meaningful results. Participants tend to perceive email visualisations as useful, with an average rating of 4.281 (out of 7) for all the visualisations in the study, with above average ratings for mountain graphs and word trees. The study shows that while participants voice a strong desire for information identifying individuals in email data, they perceive visualisations as almost equally useful for their research and/or work when aggregation is employed in addition to anonymisation.
Subjects: 
Email visualisation
Privacy
Archives
Perceived usefulness
Research data
Data management
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.