ClioVis: Visualizing Connections (Review, Journal of American History)
Dr. Jason Heppler of George Mason University reviewed ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek, in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of American History. According to an excerpt from the review:
ClioVis provides an interactive, visual approach to historical events and sources. The platform is developed and maintained by a small team at the University of Texas at Austin led by Erika Bsumek and the developers Ian Diaz, and Braeden Kennedy. The team has built an incredibly useful platform for history educators.
The core visual focus of the platform is a timeline where historical events are laid out with a node and, if there is a duration for the event, a visual indicator that spans time. In the background, a colored band can indicate more general durations (for example, the years of World War II) that also help visually distinguish nodes within broader events. Events are laid out chronologically, as one would expect with any timeline tool, but the innovation here is the ability to link together related nodes. A timeline displaying the onset of the Cold War, for example, can begin with a node and duration that spans 1945 to 1990. But the originating Cold War node can also point to related, additional nodes on the timeline such as the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, or the Iron Curtain. Thus, ClioVis helps not only visualize the chronology of events but also emphasizes the connections and contingencies of historical moments and how they relate to one another. Think of it as a chronological mind map.
For the complete review, access the article PDF.
Jason A Heppler, ClioVis: Visualizing Connections, Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 4, March 2024, Pages 827–828, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad435
Related Initiatives
The Keys to Understanding History: Unlocking Digital Timelines
This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”