Avocado Research Email Collection

Item Name: Avocado Research Email Collection
Author(s): Douglas Oard, William Webber, David A. Kirsch, Sergey Golitsynskiy
LDC Catalog No.: LDC2015T03
ISBN: 1-58563-704-1
ISLRN: 102-408-869-995-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.35111/wqt6-jg60
Release Date: February 16, 2015
Member Year(s): 2015
DCMI Type(s): Text
Data Source(s): email
Application(s): information retrieval, discourse analysis, topic detection and tracking
Language(s): English
Language ID(s): eng
License(s): Avocado Collection - Individual Agreement
Avocado Collection - Organization Agreement
Online Documentation: LDC2015T03 Documents
Licensing Instructions: Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members
Citation: Oard, Douglas, et al. Avocado Research Email Collection LDC2015T03. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2015.

Introduction

Avocado Research Email Collection consists of emails and attachments taken from 279 accounts of a defunct information technology company referred to as "Avocado". Most of the accounts are those of Avocado employees; the remainder represent shared accounts such as "Leads", or system accounts such as "Conference Room Upper Canada".

The collection consists of the processed personal folders of these accounts with metadata describing folder structure, email characteristics and contacts, among others. It is expected to be useful for social network analysis, e-discovery and related fields.

Data

The source data for the collection consisted of Personal Storage Table (PST) files for 282 accounts. A PST file is used by MS Outlook to store emails, calendar entries, contact details, and related information. Data was extracted from the PST files using libpst version 0.6.54. Three files produced no output and and are not included in the collection. Each account is referred to as a "custodian" although some of the accounts do not correspond to humans.

The collection is divided into metadata and text. The metadata is represented in XML, with a single top-level XML file listing the custodians, and then one XML file per custodian listing all items extracted from that custodian's PST files. The full XML tree can be read by loading the top-level file with an XML parser that handles directives. All XML metadata files are encoded in UTF-8. The text contains the extracted text of the items in the custodians' folders, with the extracted text for each item being held in a separate file. The text files are then zipped into a zip file per custodian.

Licensing

Users are required to sign two license agreements in order to access this corpus, the Avocado Collection Organizational License Agreement and the Avocado Collection End User Agreement. Those agreements can be viewed in the License field of this catalog entry.

Updates

None at this time.

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