Bartliff, Z., Kim, Y. orcid.org/0000-0001-5400-0389 and Hopfgartner, F. orcid.org/0000-0003-0380-6088 (2024) Towards privacy-aware exploration of archived personal emails. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 25. pp. 729-763. ISSN 1432-5012
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Email visualisation; Privacy; Archives; Perceived usefulness; Research data; Data management |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL AH/R007012/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Mar 2024 11:25 |
Last Modified: | 04 Nov 2024 09:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s00799-024-00394-5 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:210653 |