E-mail as spectroscopy: Automated discovery of community structure within organizations

被引:192
作者
Tyler, JR [1 ]
Wilkinson, DM [1 ]
Huberman, BA [1 ]
机构
[1] HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA
关键词
communities of practice; e-mail; e-mail communities; informal leadership; qualitative methods; social networks;
D O I
10.1080/01972240590925348
中图分类号
G2 [信息与知识传播];
学科分类号
05 [文学]; 0503 [新闻传播学];
摘要
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.
引用
收藏
页码:133 / 141
页数:9
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