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This study analyzes the implementation of Net.Create, a collaborative network analysis tool (Craig & Danish, 2018), in the context of a digital humanities classroom. Undergraduate students used network analysis to investigate historical objects gathered from the local community in a History Harvest. This paper focuses on the collaborative engagement of groups as they co-constructed conceptual frameworks in Net.Create to explain the individual, social, and cultural histories attached to these objects. Findings suggest that positive social engagement and metacognitive behaviors can support students’ sustained engagement with historical and network analysis ideas. Interwoven personal-oriented and class-oriented social engagement in the data suggest that these forms of engagement can productively sustain engagement with cognitively demanding activities. Having built a supportive environment for collaboration amongst themselves, students were able to smoothly and effectively build on each other’s ideas to generate an understanding of historical and network analysis patterns. 

Purpose The authors explored shifts in social interactions, content engagement and history learning as students who were studying one pandemic simultaneously experienced another. This paper aims to understand how the Net.Create network visualization tool would support students as they tried to understand the many complex interactions in a historical text in a remote learning environment and how sustained knowledge building using Net.Create would shape student attitudes toward remote learning, collaboration and engagement. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores changes in engagement and learning in a survey-level history course on the black death after a shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used activity theory to focus the adaptation of Net.Create, a web-based collaborative social-network-analysis tool and to understand how it supported group-based remote learning. The authors describe how the redesigned activities sustained engagement with historical content and report coded student network entries, reading responses and surveys to illustrate changes in engagement and learning. Findings The results suggest that students benefit from personal connections to historical content and their peers. Net.Create supported both through collaborative knowledge-building activities and reflection on how their quarantine experiences compared to the historical content they read. It is possible to avoid student frustrations with traditional “group work” even in a remote environment by supporting collaborative learning using Net.Create and a mix of individual and group contributions. Originality/value This is the first use of a collaborative network visualization tool to support large classroom interaction and engagement with history content at the undergraduate level. 

History educators in large-lecture humanities undergraduate classrooms struggle to support reading comprehension, defined as the ability to simultaneously read a complex text critically, understand the text’s details and context, and vet the text’s claims. Critical reading of historical texts in particular helps bridge the gap between seeing history as memorization-oriented and seeing it as an inquiry-oriented discipline that reconstructs narrative and context. Net.Create is an open-source, network-analysis software tool paired with activities that support intuitive creation and revision of a network data set and accompanying visualization, and through these representational practices, reading comprehension in humanities classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to emphasize context reconstruction over memorization. 

This poster discusses a promising collaboration platform to encourage students in co- constructing historical knowledge through a network visualization tool. The tool uniquely mediated collaboration at both the small and large group level in a big lecture format undergraduate history class. The findings demonstrated the tool mediated a specific sequence of collaborating processes at both levels and students’ ability to see the historical relationships.