Much has been written about the Hillary Clinton email controversy. For those not familiar with the topic, the United States Secretary of State used her family’s private email server for official email communications, rather than official State Department email accounts maintained on federal government servers. Why did she do this? It stems from the fact that prior to her appointment as Secretary of State, Clinton and her circle of friends and colleagues communicated via BlackBerry phones. Due to State Department security concerns, she was not allowed to take her BlackBerry into her private office. The email account used for Clinton’s BlackBerry was then hosted on a private server in the basement of her home.
The FBI recently released the non-classified emails, and we decided to analyze the email messages with the Signals platform. (To access the job click here.)
We processed roughly 8,000 emails in under 10 minutes. The analysis confirms what the media is saying:
- Secretary Clinton sent emails from her family email server. This can be seen in Signals by looking at the frequent contributor section of the analysis as seen below. <hrod17@clintonemail.com> is the number one contributor.
2. Frequent topics in Secretary Clinton’s emails included Foreign Policy, National Security., Middle East, and Healthcare. We saw this clearly in the Category view, which can be displayed as a Pie Chart or Tree View as depicted below.
3. The emails are generally short, running only a sentence or two in many cases. This is easily discerned by looking at the Feedback Details section at the bottom.
4. Many emails are simply a response to another State Department official. Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin authored many of the emails, shown right below Secretary Clinton in the Frequent Contributor section of the analysis.
5. The bulk of the emails are to and from state department officials engaged in the day-to-day business. This is observed in both the Buzzword view and in examining the Feedback Details.
6. Much of the email communication is real-time information, such as travel plans, schedule adjustments, and sharing of current articles in the media.
7. We went deeper into the data on negative sentiment and found many were related to negative events such as the U.S. reporters being held captive in North Korea, Sri Lanka groups using rape as a weapon, the tragedy in Libya, and the viewpoint on Republicans.
8. We also examined positive sentiment emails, and found much of it was emails offering congratulations, thanks for a wonderful event, wishing safe travel, etc. These included positive sentiment emails from outside groups such as the Albright Stonebridge Group and the Brookings Institute.
This use case shows the power of the Signals platform to rapidly analyze thousands of unstructured text documents, and present an intuitive visual analysis. You do not need to be a Data Scientist to get useful insights out of the email data.
Would you like to try Signals for yourself? Contact us by emailing clientsupport@stratifyd.com
