What 23 Years of E-Mail May Say About You
By ANNE EISENBERG April 7, 2012
MOST of us accumulate huge amounts of data in our lives - including e-mails, telephone calls and spikes of writing activity, as measured by daily keystrokes.
Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur, wondered: Could all of that information be compiled into a personal database, then analyzed to tell us something meaningful about our lives? Maybe it could suggest when we tended to be the most creative or productive, along with the circumstances that led up to those moments.
Dr. Wolfram runs Wolfram Research, which is deeply steeped in data analysis, along with Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that provides many answers for Siri, the personal assistant for Apple's iPhone 4S.
Computers are good at spotting patterns, and Dr. Wolfram thought an analysis of his own personal data might reveal patterns in his life - for example, when he was most likely to come up with new ideas, "preferably good ones."
Dr. Wolfram, who lives in the Boston area, calls himself a "remote C.E.O." - interacting with his company, which is based in Champaign, Ill., almost exclusively by e-mail and phone. He has accumulated data on the job for decades - whether for hundreds of thousands of his outgoing e-mails back to 1989, for 100 million or so of his keystrokes since 2002, or the time and duration of thousands of phone calls.
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