Building Network Visualization Tools to Facilitate Metacognition in Complex Analysis

If whole communities of domain analysts are to be able to use interactive network visualization tools productively and efficiently, tool design needs to adequately support the metacognition implicit in complex visual analytic tasks. Metacognition for such exploratory network-mediated tasks applies across disciplines. This essay presents metacognitive demands inherent in complex tasks aimed at uncovering relevant relationships for hypothesizing purposes and proposes network visualization tool designs that can support these metacognitive demands.