Knowledge transparency in art education: A visual inquiry reflection

Building on a decade of collaboration focused on research transparency, we embarked on what seemed like a straightforward technical project: creating an interactive map of art education research connections across five major art education journals. After contracting with JSTOR to obtain the metadata for 13,000 articles, we began designing a visualization of citation networks that is interactive. We assumed the main technical challenge would be our minimal programming skills. However, the pivotal moment came when our programmer discovered that his extraction code kept failing due to the inconsistency of the XML metadata. This discovery shifted our research focus to understanding why the data themselves were creating obstacles. We discovered that systemic issues within the infrastructure used to store, organize and communicate knowledge hindered knowledge transparency extending beyond individual access issues. This experience made us aware of data visualization as a method for discovering why patterns might be absent, in addition to displaying existing patterns.