benWe’re usually so busy with project work that we do not have a chance to talk about things that we’re working on. Luckily our partners are usually researcher who do publish their work, and every once in a while we get featured.
Two of our long time collaborators, Kalani Craig and Joshua Danish, have recently published an article about their work with Net.Create in the Journal of Digital History: Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research.
Net.Create is a collaboratively constructed network graph application. It’s used by a mix of researchers, undergrads, and middle school students to construct and analyze network graphs on a number of topics, from history, to literature, to science.
While there have been a number of publications about research studies with Net.Create, this article stands out for its focus on the design process and the articulation of a theoretical framework and design rationale. In short, it deftly walks through the whole design history of Net.Create, from its initial conception and early prototyping with off-the-shelf tools, through the collaborative design work of researchers, developers, and teachers to build and refine working custom prototypes, through latter stage refinement and enhancement as needs and understanding evolve over time, all couched within a theoretical framework of Design-Based History Research (DBHR). It provides a relatively succinct narrative of a long (8 year) fruitful working partnership and really embodies the back-and-forth iterative design collaboration that we strive for.
You can learn more about Net.Create here:
- Inquirium’s updated web page on Net.Create
- netcreate.org‘s offical web site — you can find a lot of research publications there.
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