June 5, 2003

cataphora

In an interview, Esther Dyson talks about Cataphora, a system that profiles email behaviors:

Then there’s this great company, Cataphora, which works with emails and other documents to do a much better job of searching for and analyzing emails. Their market right now is primarily litigation and [legal] discovery. For example, if you’re looking for emails in a brokerage house, it’s pretty rare that you find something that says ‘XYZ Company is a piece of shit.’ Instead, there’s something that says ‘This is an important accommodation for a banking client,’ and you don’t know how to look for that. There is no keyword that would get you to that. So you want to look at patterns of communication, who has talked to whom, and did the chairman of the company talk to the analyst before the analyst raised his ratings? Who talked to whom, before so and so sold their stock? It's not just the content—you want to look at communication patterns.

Cataphora lets you see how and when people are connected rather than what they said.. but that lets you know where to look for the content you want. It displays the communication patterns in a kind of flowchart that shows the progress of conversations over time, who talks to whom and so forth. So you can you say, ‘Look at all the emails between this guy and that guy on such and such a date.’ And you see who within the conversation suddenly stopped talking. As Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder, says, ‘One guy who usually talks to everybody is suddenly cut out of the conversation. Maybe they’re planning a surprise birthday party, but usually it’s something else….’

The question is whether or not the outsider can figure out the something else. For example, in my visualizations, sometimes folks broke up, sometimes people died, sometimes a project ended, etc. But the data owner always knew.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at June 5, 2003 3:46 PM | TrackBack