Development of ENA 3D: A Tool for Epistemic Network Analysis in Three-Dimensional Space

Previous attempts in constructing epistemic networks in 3-dimensional space have faced criticism for being misguided. This paper seeks to contribute to the field of Quantitative Ethnography (QE) by introducing ENA 3D, a software that allows the interactive exploration of various dimensions in Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) in 3D space. ENA utilizes means rotations and singular value decomposition to project the normalized adjacency matrix to the low dimensional space. Although the first and second dimensions, representing the maximum and secondary difference of groups, are commonly used to construct the 2D projection, the significance of the remaining dimensions are often overlooked. ENA 3D, however, changes this narrative by providing a platform for easy visualization of these neglected dimensions in 3D space. This tool enables network visualization, comparison, change tracking, statistical summary, and 2-dimensionalization. To demonstrate its capabilities, we apply ENA 3D to a Taiwanese discourse dataset, revealing the statistical significance between groups in the remaining dimensions.