Integrating Students’ Interests, Identities and Ways of Knowing with Network Visualization Tools to Explore Data Literacy Concepts is a Developing and Testing Innovations project responding to the growing recognition that data literacy is an increasingly important set of skills and network science in particular is at the heart of today’s youth’s experiences with technology. The goal of this project is to explore a synergistic approach in which middle school students (7th and 8th grades) use network visualization to learn about themselves and their communities, while simultaneously learning about the underlying network science and data literacy principles that make their exploration possible, and which are central to their experiences with many common technologies. To accomplish this, the project team has partnered with middle school teachers to design, implement, and study lessons about network visualization using the open-source Net.Create software tool. As part of a co-design process with teachers, we are creating history and English language arts lessons that will help students engage with core network visualization and data literacy practices in service of an exploration of their own, and their communities’, interests and lives that also meets key digital literacy and disciplinary standards.