Lecy, J., Diesner, J., & Carley, K.M. (2006). Identification of Knowledge Groups from the Enron Email Corpus. 56th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). Dresden, Germany, June 19-23, 2006.

Enron’s recent bankruptcy and the legal fall-out highlight the importance of understanding information transfer among collaborating individuals. Our research is driven by the attempt to establish evidence of knowledge sharing that is independent of explicit records of interaction. In our research we are comparing two different strategies for identifying clusters within communication networks among individuals from the Enron email corpus. Our study is based on the assumption that evidence for the existence of clusters can be retrieved from email data. The first strategy relies on explicit relational information (‘to’ and ‘from’ ties in the email headers) and traditional social network clustering tactics. We propose and empirically test a second strategy that applies network text analysis to the bodies of the emails in order to identify groups of people (knowledge clusters) who share a ‘consensus’ measure with respect to their topical mental models. We will report on the clusters identified with both strategies, and the congruence between them.