When Enron was hit with lawsuits, the prosecution required the company to turn over the incriminating emails it had it its database through a legal process called discovery. Usually a company undergoing this kind of discovery carefully combs through its email and publishes only those messages that are relevant to the case, eliminating its employees' private messages and confidential material otherwise not related to the case.
However, Enron opted to save money by just dumping all of its email online, employee love-letters and all. This was bad for employee privacy, but good for social network researchers.
Jeffrey Heer at UC Berkeley has produced "enronic," a system for visualizing the relationships between Enron employees based on who emailed whom and how often. It's a Java applet that you can download and mess around with — you can even take a turn at sleuthing out hidden participants in the scam by trying your own social network analysis.
Suppose we want to learn more about Enron's role in the California Energy Crisis by analyzing e-mail traffic. One aspect of this is to learn how information was being distributed within the company — who knew what, when? Who are the "big players" that might effect Enron's corporate behavior? One way to start is to first seek out nodes that either send or receive messages from numerous employees, thus possibly representing either hubs or authorities in the network.
We start by using the connectivity slider to filter the graph, revealing the more electornically-connected individuals within the organization. We can then visually search for message traffic involving the California Energy Crisis by searching the edge labels for the matching category color. One can then sample the various e-mails involved to search for clues.
(via WorldChanging)
