Spamology

Spamology is a live audiovisual representation of word frequencies in spam e-mail messages.

The visualization is based on analysis of a private archive of spam messages which were collected during 10 years (1998-2007), containing up to 2,000,000 emails originated from various parts of the world. Spam data is visualized in a 3D landscape, where popular words are represented as rectangular structures of various heights, illustrating the occurrence rate of each word in the archive year. Next to the visual representation, each word generates an audio signal with a frequency related to the number of times it occurred during a certain year. Words of various frequencies flow through the 3D landscape simultaneously, forming a constantly-changing sonic texture.

Spamology is a part of ongoing research examining the nature of Spam as a digital-cultural phenomenon. The project aims at visualizing the links and interrelationships between the contents of spam, the user/ individual and the society, by revealing patterns which may reflect cultural and social trends, behaviors and variations.