Multi-perspective Visualisation Approach for E-discovery Email Investigations

Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan, Cagatay Turkay

giCentre, City, University of London, UK

Creation, Curation, Critique and Conditioning of Principles and Guidelines in Visualization (C4PGV)

In conjunction with IEEE VIS 2016, Oct 23th, Baltimore, MD, USA

Red Sift

OverviewIn our work, we aim to understand the role of visualisation in investigating email communication (E-discovery) by identifying design suggestions through workshops with legal experts that will inform the design process.

Motivation• Electronic Discovery (E-discovery) manual investigation is expensive, time

consuming and less efficient. In our case, we considered email communication investigation.

• Email data is dynamic and multi-modal that involves several individuals, their relationships and temporal behaviours.

• Simple, dynamic and interactive visualisations can be of great help, such that they can change the way analysts/investigators understand contacts, messages in inboxes and their relationship over time.

WorkshopsCase Study - Email Communication Analysis (Enron)

Focus - Visualisation Requirements

Target - Legal Experts and Analysts

Design Suggestions1. Multi-faceted: representation must be supported with a multi-faceted search feature to display various granularities.

2. Multi-modality: representation must include temporal behaviors, individuals' action, connections and text/topic responses.

3. Multi-level: representation must support a drill-down approach through data filtering and provide visual guidance.

4. Multi-aggregation: representation must be systematically organised based on the multiple aggregations in all the levels.

5. Multi-juxtaposition: representations must be effective for displaying multiple relationships and comparison.

Prototype Design

Conclusion• Based on the workshop recommendation by the legal experts, we

observed that, multi-perspective approach considering the five features as a heterogeneous viewpoints can help analysts.

• Design suggestions taken into consideration, we came up with a first prototype version.

• As a further work, we will conduct empirical studies to confirm the design suggestions as our guidelines.