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RAPT Lab: Representations, Activity, Play, and Technology Lab

Projects: Net.Create and VFOI

Net.Create is a collaborative network visualization tool developed to help users explore a large corpus of data concurrently together. This was originally implemented in undergraduate history classrooms, and more recently we have worked with middle school students to explore data literacy and their collective funds of identity.


Net.Create was originally developed to support undergraduate history classrooms, with a focus on how dynamic, collaboratively constructed visualization could help students see both big-picture patterns and local nuance in a large text (e.g., a data set). We immediately saw the potential of this approach for exploring complex data sets across a range of ages and topics. Subsequent experimentations included creating a network visualization for several undergraduate and graduate level courses, as well as a visualization of our research team’s overlapping interests in hobbies and research topics. In our most recent iteration, we’ve explored how this kind of visualization can serve as a space for exploring collective identity, data literacy, and other concepts in middle-school classrooms.

Here is a small network showing the relationship between RAPT, our research interests, and Net.Create: RAPT Lab in NetCreate

For additional example networks, including the networks that 5th and 6th grade students explored, see our examples page.

Funding for the the iterations of the Net.Create and VFOI Project

Grant Name Funding Agency Grant Number Co-PIs
Collaborative Research: Integrating Students’ Interests, Identities and Ways of Knowing with Network Visualization Tools to Explore Data Literacy Concepts NSF 2241705 & 2241706 Joshua Danish, Kalani Craig, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Ben Loh, Merijke Coenraad
EAGER: Net.Create: Using Network Analysis to Support Digital Humanities in Large History Classrooms NSF 1848655 Kalani Craig, Joshua Danish, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Ben Loh

Publications on the Net.Create and VFOI Project

2024

2023

2021

2020

2019

2017