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SUMMARY:Nobody Writes Letters Anymore: Helping people make sense of histor
 ically significant email collections - Douglas W. Oard\, University of Mar
 yland\, USA
DTSTART:20080704T110000Z
DTEND:20080704T120000Z
UID:TALK12555@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Johanna Geiss
DESCRIPTION:The archivist’s dilemma is that in a world with vastly more 
 information being created\, less of what we should keep may reach the arch
 ive in forms that we know how to manage. Much of present archival practice
  rests on four key facts: important records have generally been written on
  paper\, paper records are (reasonably) persistent\, paper records require
  some level of manual description\, and the costs of description and prese
 rvation necessitate appraisal and selection. We are\, however\, moving tow
 ard a world in which records that are never committed to paper may prove t
 o be ephemeral\, digital objects can be (at least to some extent) self-des
 cribing\, and the economics of appraisal and retention might therefore rev
 erse. Many projects are now working on reliably getting important digital 
 records into the future\, so in this talk I’ll focus on what I as the na
 tural next step: helping to at least partially automate description. In or
 der to illustrate how this might be done\, I’ll describe joint work with
  Tamer Elsayed to automatically resolve the identity of people who are men
 tioned ambiguously (e.g.\, just by first name) in a collection of email fr
 om a failed corporation (Enron). Our results indicate that\, at least for 
 people who are well represented in the collection\, we can use a generativ
 e model to guess the right identity more than 80% of the time. I’ll conc
 lude the talk with a few remarks on our next directions for techniques\, e
 valuation\, and additional types of collections to which similar ideas mig
 ht be applied.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Computer Laboratory
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