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Net.Create: Network Visualization to Support Collaborative Historical Knowledge Building

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Abstract

Students across disciplines struggle with sensemaking when they are faced with the need to understand and analyze massive amounts of information. This is particularly salient in the disciplines of both history and data science. Our approach to helping students build expertise with complex information leverages activity theory to think about the design of a classroom activity system integrated with the design of a collaborative open-source network-analysis software tool called Net.Create. Through analysis of network log data as well as video data of students’ collaborative interactions with Net.Create, we explore how our activity system helped students reconcile common contradictions that create barriers to dealing with complex datasets in large lecture classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to move more readily between small detail and aggregate overview. Students at both high and low initial skill levels were able to increase the complexity of their historical analyses through their engagement with the Net.Create tool and activities. Net.Create transforms the limitation of large class sizes in history classrooms into a resource for students’ collaborative knowledge building, and through collaborative data entry it supports the historiographic practices of citation and revision and helps students embed local historical actors into a larger historical context.

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Notes

  1. The term activity theory is often used as synonymous with cultural historical activity theory (CHAT). We have opted to use the shorter version to focus our explicit interest in how activity is organized, but we view both literatures as entirely relevant.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge our software-development partner, Inquirium, and our late-Antique expert, Dr. Colin Elliott. Our work was supported by a number of Indiana University–Bloomington partners: the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, the Center for Research on Learning & Technology, the Indiana University Network Institute, the Department of History, and the Office of the Vice Provost of Research. We also thank the undergraduates whose engagement and intellectual labor made this study possible. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. DRL-1848655.

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  1. Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Kalani Craig & Maksymilian Szostalo

  2. Learning Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Joshua Danish, Megan Humburg & Cindy Hmelo-Silver

  3. Indiana University Network Institute, Indiana University Bloomington, , Bloomington, IN, USA

    Ann McCranie

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  1. Kalani Craig
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Craig, K., Danish, J., Humburg, M. et al. Net.Create: Network Visualization to Support Collaborative Historical Knowledge Building. Intern. J. Comput.-Support. Collab. Learn 16, 185–223 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-021-09343-9

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