1 Making Sense of Archived Email: Exploring the Enron Collection with NetLens Hyunmo Kang, a Catherine Plaisant, a Tamer Elsayed, b and Douglas W. Oard a,c a UMIACS Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, b Computer Science Department, and c College of Information Studies University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 {kang, plaisant, telsayed, oard}@cs.umd.edu Abstract Informal communications media pose new challenges for information systems design, but the nature of informal interaction offers new opportunities as well. This paper describes NetLens- Email, a system designed to support exploration of the content-actor network in large email collection. Unique features of NetLens-Email include close coupling of orientation, specification, restriction and expansion and introduction and incorporation of a novel capability for iterative projection between content and actor networks within the same collection. Scenarios are presented to illustrate the intended employment of NetLens-Email, and design walkthroughs with two domain experts provide an initial basis for assessment of the suitability of the design by scholars and analysts. 1. Introduction Systems designed to support information seeking processes have traditionally focused on documents such as books, scholarly articles and news stories that are written in a formal style and carefully edited. The emergence of the Web has brought new challenges (e.g., limiting adversarial manipulation of search results from ―search engine optimization‖), new opportunities (e.g., from the rich network of interconnections between Web pages), and increased emphasis on certain types of information needs (e.g., ―navigational queries‖ seeking a service rather than a document).