Comparing Epistemic Frames: An exercise in visual comparison

We consider the comparison of Epistemic Frames as an example of a visual comparison problem. Epistemic Frames (also known as Epistemic Networks) are a representation used by Learning Scientists to encode the state of one’s knowledge about a domain. The data consist of association strengths between a set of concepts, which can be thought of as edge weights of an undirected graph. The important tasks involve comparing networks or their trajectories. We describe the nature of the data and the tasks and some of our initial efforts to create visualizations of the data including using the problem as a design challenge in a class. We also discuss how this problem is indicative of the general class of visual comparison problems.