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MailGarden

Official MailGarden website: http://human-centered-visualizations.com

MailGarden, part of the Human Centred Data View project, visualises the contents of one email mailbox (read in the mbox format for open goodness) on your computer as a forest of trees. Each tree in this forest represents an email, with the height of the trees reflecting the length of the mail. Moving your mouse over a tree shows some details about the email. The overall aim is to create a view of your mailbox that encourages a more reflective kind of consciousness.

In future versions we envisage more options for the data used to generate the trees, including the ability to grow individual trees to represent individual people (one tree per person, with each branch representing a single email sent by this person), email threads (one tree per thread, with each branch representing an email in the thread).

Looking further into the future, we envisage the ability to visualise other kinds of communication-related data, including instant messaging history and calender data, and to do all of this with an open architecture that allows anyone to create a plugin to import and visualise their own kind of data.

Developed by Kjen Wilkens, Damian Stewart, Jenny Cahier, and Marcela Machuca at Visualizar, Medialab Prado, Madrid, Spain.

Downloads, including full source code, are available on request: see http://human-centered-visualizations.com for more info.

Trees growing.

Trees fully grown. They sway gently backwards and forwards.

You can zoom in on the trees.

Showing email headers…

… and email content.