Interesting... Here are some ideas to think about or shoot down.
Is there a role for different types of arrows between entities? I can imagine writing something and wanting to indicate that it is in response to (a particular paragraph?) of a particular email, but I might also want to point back to the beginning (message or paragraph(s)) of this particular thread, which may be embedded in a larger thread, as in the case of an idea originating in a response to another message. I might also want to refer to background material. I might want to assign importance or weight to arrows, as in 'I am responding to this message, but it also has some relevance for this other message.' The most general case is that of assigning an attribute to an arrow, but you'd have to be careful about making it too complex. Some sort of 'force-collapsible' display (e.g., http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/force-collapsible.html or the WordFlex iPad app) would make browsing interesting. The Mac app DevonThink has 'see-also' and 'classify' operations that attempt to find similarities between text bits that seem to be based on vocabulary similarities (they claim it is 'AI-based'). That would be a possible direction eventually. This similarities could provide additional weighted arrows between nodes. They have some server-based products, but I am not familiar with them. If you're a fan of crowd-sourcing, people could add weighted arrows to make explicit connections that they find. Nodes could gather weight or importance based on 'reviews' consisting of an integer. Most of these suggestions make printing a result impractical, but perhaps online interaction would be enough. You could choose which part of the graph to look at by clicking on a node to see its neighborhood. Sizes of nodes could reflect their weight. You could select what subset of arrows you want to see. --Barry PS. All the data of an email (except attachments) are transmitted together. To see all of it together in a file, save the message as a file. (On a Mac using Apple Mail, select a message, choose File/Save As..., and you'll get the file. Mail programs parse this to separate the content and header information for you. On Jan 21, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Ron Newman wrote: > I'm willing to donate a FRIAM license of MyIdeaTree (drag and drop building > of network graphs from links). I'd learn a ton about usability from that. > The email / blog content would have to be located on the web somewhere. > > Ron
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