Consider trust in your email.

a. Look at the last 50 messages you have received. Make a list of all the people who have emailed you in that time.

b. Rate the trust you have in each of those people. You may rate trust with respect to a particular context (e.g., professional trust) or give a more general trust rating.

c. Independently, rate the importance of each email as low, medium, or high.

d. How well does the trust you have in the email senders relate to the email importance? Do low-importance emails tend to come from people you trust less?

e. Using Gephi or NodeXL, build a network of your email contacts. Add in the trust ratings you created as weights on the edges. Create a visualization that uses those edge weights.

f. Analyze the network you created in (e), with attention to the trust relationships. Do more trusted people tend to be connected? Is there any pattern in the trust relationships?