What is network visualization?

Network visualization is a concept in personal epistemology: Drawing nodes and edges makes complex relationship structures comprehensible.

Example: Your team has twelve active projects with dependencies across four departments. In a spreadsheet, the dependencies read as a wall of text — 'Project Alpha depends on Design and Backend; Project Beta depends on Backend and Data; Data depends on Infrastructure...' No one can see the bottleneck. The moment you draw each project as a circle and each dependency as a line, the picture is immediate: Infrastructure is a hub with seven lines radiating outward, and every critical path runs through it. The graph didn't add information. It made the structure visible.

This concept is part of Phase 13 (Relationship Mapping) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for relationship mapping.