ITP ListServ Network Visualization

ITP is a two year graduate program at NYU focused on the intersection of art and technology, “a Center for the Recently Possible.” One way a sense of community and connection is facilitated is with the ITP student listserv, host to all sorts of email conversations between students on everything from missing power chargers to animated gifs and pop culture.

My experience of the ITP student listserv upon arriving at ITP in the Fall of 2013 was one of mostly confusion, my inbox suddenly overwhelmed by a barrage of emails from people I didn’t know replete with animated gifs and insider jokes. By the Spring Semester of this year, my sense of the listserv was that it seemed largely dominated by Second Year students, who seemed to mainly just be speaking with Second Year students with minimal participation by First Year students.

I decided to test my theory by gathering my gmail data and creating a network visualization of the ITP listserv.

First Year students are grouped on the right hand side of the circle, and Second Year students on the left side. The density of lines is much greater on the left side of the circle, indicating there are more public conversations taking place between Second Year students.

During the process of researching for this project, I discovered an ITP student listserv network visualization made in 2007 by Joshua Knowles. My visualization chooses as its reference point the 2007 visualization, but I have many ideas to expand on this earlier visualization including making the visualization interactive so users can more deeply explore the data, and visually exploring the class imbalance of listserv usage.

I believe it is important to explore data in context. Once my data visualization is interactive, I would like to user-test it with ITP students, while also getting feedback from students on their own individual experience of the listserv and the ways it could be improved upon.

So how did I create this visualization? With Dan Shiffman’s guidance, I wrote a Processing program to visualize the ITP ListServ:

• I first downloaded the thread id number, sender email and subject line of all my ITP ListServ emails using this Python Gmail Library. Many thanks to Adam Parrish for helping me with this step of the project!
• I cleaned up my Gmail data, removing email addresses from the data file, matching names with correct formal name spelling, and consolidating data if an individual used multiple email addresses
• Gmail assigns a thread ID number for emails in the same thread. In Processing, I parsed the data to group associated senders with each unique thread ID number. 
• For every student at ITP, I created a Sender “profile” with a blank list of ITP students.
• I then looped through all the email threads. If a Sender was in an email thread, I looped through all the senders associated with that email thread and increased the conversation count in the Sender profile, essentially giving 1 point every time a Sender was in the same thread with other students.
• Lastly, I drew the connections between Senders to create a circular network visualization. I built out this part of the sketch using a Text Network Visualization sketch by Jer Thorp for guidance. Many thanks to Adarsh Kosuru for helping me work through this final step.

It’s exciting to have something drawn to show my peers, and I have many ideas to refine and build upon the visualization over the next few weeks. Later down the road, it would be great to build this out to live online.