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MUSE: reviving memories using email archives

Published: 16 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Email archives silently record our actions and thoughts over the years, forming a passively acquired and detailed life-log that contains rich material for reminiscing on our lives. However, exploratory browsing of archives containing thousands of messages is tedious without effective ways to guide the user towards interesting events and messages. We present Muse (Memories USing Email), a system that combines data mining techniques and an interactive interface to help users browse a long-term email archive. Muse analyzes the contents of the archive and generates a set of cues that help to spark users' memories: communication activity with inferred social groups, a summary of recurring named entities, occurrence of sentimental words, and image attachments. These cues serve as salient entry points into a browsing interface that enables faceted navigation and rapid skimming of email messages. In our user studies, we found that users generally enjoyed browsing their archives with Muse, and extracted a range of benefits, from summarizing work progress to renewing friendships and making serendipitous discoveries.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2011
654 pages
ISBN:9781450307161
DOI:10.1145/2047196
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 16 October 2011

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UIST '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 262 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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  • (2024)Towards privacy-aware exploration of archived personal emailsInternational Journal on Digital Libraries10.1007/s00799-024-00394-525:4(729-763)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2024
  • (2022)How do people experience the temporality of everyday life changes? Towards the exploration of existential time in HCIInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102899167:COnline publication date: 19-Sep-2022
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