My sister-in-law just called to tell me that the New York Times Week in Review today includes the article, Enron Offers and Unlikely Boost to E-Mail Surveillance. (You may need to subscribe to see this online.) It summarizes research by Dr. David Skillikorn (Queen’s University in Canada), Kathleen Carley (Carnegie Mellon), and Michael Berry (U of Tennessee) on the public dataset of 1.5 million e-mails from 150 accounts at Enron. As a tool for retrospective analysis of the events leading up to the collapse of Enron, it offers both telling correlations (such as the spurt in e-mail traffice during the manipulation of California energy prices), and insight into how the use of e-mail analysis might be used, for the public good (tracking terrorists).

Like many articles on SNA that now appear outside the confines of academic research, this one clearly contributes to the education and awareness of this new application in the social sciences. This is new evidence for the scaffolding being built to help us understand how to live, work, and manage in a networked world.