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): | |
| 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.