When Enron collapsed and got hit with a lawsuit requesting discovery on its internal email, its top bosses decided that they’d skip spending money on pricey lawyers to go through the archive and remove immaterial messages — instead, the dumped the entire corpus of internal mail, including their employees’ personal messages.
For years, social scientists have used the Enron dataset to look at information cascades, social graphs, and linguistics.
Now, in Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy, Georgia Tech’s Eric Gilbert applies computational lexigraphic analysis to the Enron corpus with an eye to figuring out how subordinates talk to their bosses, and how bosses talk to their subordinates, and what role gender plays in the matter.It’s a fascinating read, and suggests loads of avenues for future work.
Source: How to send email like a non-metaphorical boss / Boing Boing