The Enron Vizards: Visualizing the Scandal Using Emails

Introduction

At the end of 2001 one of the biggest accounting scandal of all time shook the financial markets and led to the bankruptcy of one of the largest energy companies in the world: Enron. The subsequent investigation analyzed the email communication of Enron employees to find evidence to charge the culprits and since then the dataset has been made publicly available. In this project, we visualize the Enron email dataset to provide a glimpse of the scandal. We show the intensity of communications around the scandal timeline, who the main actors were, whether there were indications of scandal before it imploded in October 2001.

Users

The target audience for these visualizations are individuals who read or heard about the scandal and want to know how email communication of Enron can give insights on the timeline of the scandal and the involvement of executives, employees and third parties.

Insights

From our data visualizations, we want to our audience to gain the following insights:

1. Personalities inside and outside of Enron who were key players in the scandal.
2. The critical time before the scandal was made public.
3. Change in topic and emotional tone of emails over time.
4. Keywords or common phrases used in emails that relate to fraud.

Data

The team will use The Enron Email Dataset (Kaggle) obtained by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the investigation and subsequently made public. This data contains around 500,000 emails between thousands of employees of the companies, including senior management.

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