Dialog in e-Mail Traffic

TL;DR

This paper uses information theory to analyze email networks, revealing how static organizational structures differ from dynamic, goal-oriented groups through temporal analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an information theoretic method to distinguish static and dynamic structures in email traffic networks, highlighting the impact of temporal dynamics.

Findings

Static structures correspond to organizational units like departments.

Dynamic structures relate to goal-oriented groups such as committees.

Temporal analysis separates static and functional network components.

Abstract

Connectivity and topology are known to yield information about networks, whose origin is self-organized, but the impact of {\it temporal dynamics} in a network is still mostly unexplored. Using an information theoretic approach to e-mail exchange, we show that an e-mail network allows for a separation of static and dynamic structures within it. The static structures are related to organizational units such as departments. The temporally linked structures turn out to be more goal-oriented, functional units such as committees and user groups.