Network and sentiment analysis of Enron emails

Background: The objective of the research was to analyze e-mails exchanged at Enron, a power company that declared bankruptcy in 2001 following an investigation into unethical operations regarding their financials. Methods Like other researchers, we identify the “most important” employees and detect “communities” using network science methods. In addition, because previous work required that 10 e-mails be sent and received for an e-mail relationship to exist, we analyzed the effect of different “thresholds” on the results. We also performed sentiment analyses on the e-mails to evaluate whether sentiment changed over time. Results We find that the “importance” of a person depends on the centrality measure used; while the communities we detected resembled the formal organizational structure of the company. In addition, we found that centrality results were very dependent on the “threshold” used. Finally, analysis of email sentiment over time = do not give insight into the financial wellbeing of Enron. Conclusion Our results provide insight into how information flowed through Enron, who the key employees were, and e-mail sentiment before and after the crisis.