Social network analysis does more than help us better understand who's sleeping with whom. It can also help investigators get to the bottom of one of the biggest corporate scandals in history: Enron.
Jeff Heer, at UC Berkeley's Computer Science department, has built a viewer for visualizing and clustering the thousands of email connections between Enron executives made public as part of the Enron investigation. Enronic is a java application (requiring the mysql database of Enron email (219 MB)) allowing users to search through the messages, looking for patterns and otherwise non-obvious connections.
(A categorized subset of Enron emails, with a focus on business-related messages, is also available.)
While work remains to be done on making Enronic a fully-developed tool for corporate network analysis, it is already showing promise. An initial test run resulted in the system highlighting Tim Belden as critical, an Enron executive already convicted for conspiracy to manipulate the California energy market. Enronic is now part of the UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis research program.
(Apologies for the post title, but really, how could I resist?)
(Via Future Feeder)