Subject Lines as Sensors: Co-word Analysis of Email to Support the Management of Collaborative Engineering Work

This paper presents a topic-based analysis of email subject line data from a large-scale engineering project and explores its utility for supporting the management of collaborative work. The main contributions of the paper are a novel interpretation of the co-word network analysis method for application within an engineering project management context, and the appraisal of the method for finding patterns within subject line data. Our findings suggest that the approach has the potential to contribute to monitoring work complexity, tracking progress, recognizing synergy and divergence, detecting scope creep, and supporting knowledge capture.