Working with Net.Create in Classrooms of All Sizes

Classroom Activities

While any research team or classroom can take advantage of Net.Create’s simultaneous editing and visualization structure, the primary activity structure Net.Create supports is a two-day activity that sets students up to read a long historical source (primary or secondary) more effectively.

It works like this:

• Day 1
  • Divide students into groups of 3-5 (3 in a fixed-seating lecture hall; 5 if you have tables).
  • Divide a long source that the students haven’t read yet into shorter excerpts and give each group 1 excerpt.
  • Guide students through entering nodes and edges.
  • End class with a discussion about betweenness and centrality as guides for helping identify and understand historical significance.
  • Give students a short reading from the source between days 1 and 2 (12-15 pages max)
• Day 2
  • Divide students into the same groups, but give them a different excerpt.
  • Ask them to revise, correct, and add to their classmates’ entries for that set of pages.
  • End class with a discussion about networks as both note-taking and analysis tools for historians.

After both days, students leave class equipped with a historical framework they built–with all of the notes they took and Net.Create’s visualization of the interactions in the source you assigned–that serve as a reference while they read the remainder of the source.

This version of Net.Create needs a computer running MacOS and a little command-line skill. If you’ve got that (or you’re willing to learn), we’re happy to share the software, along with our slide deck, a list of shared features for the 7 primary and secondary sources we’ve used with this activity, and whatever help we can offer you and your students.