By Haley Price

Haley Price is a senior majoring in history and honors humanities. Her research interests include the nexus between games and history education as well as the Italian Renaissance. She hopes to combine these interests in her senior thesis, then go on to pursue further study with a focus on digital history. This article is part of a wider series that explores how teachers and students across the department, the university and world more generally are responding in new ways to the unprecedented classroom environment we face in a time of global pandemic.  The goal is to share innovative resources and ideas with a focus on digital tools, scholarship and archives. This article is one of a number exploring ClioVis, a innovative digital timeline tool developed by Dr Erika Bsumek. This interview can best be read alongside ClioVis: Description, Origin and Uses. A conversation with Dr Bsumek about ClioVis can be seen here.

With classrooms and libraries closed this year, life as a history student is a unique challenge. I’m heading into my senior year as a history major, and I think I can be honest that, no matter how excited I am for my class schedule, I’m not looking forward to doing it online. Even though this isn’t the senior year I had hoped for, I think there are still opportunities to do great undergraduate research, even while staying at home.

I’ve always had an interest in digital history and I’ve been working with online tools for a long time now, so I know there are ways to make online learning more effective. I’m especially grateful that there are so many digital tools to help students engage with the past. ClioVis is one of the best of them. Though it is no replacement for the community we find in the classroom, ClioVis has become a hugely valuable tool for me when it comes to research. I find it also brings some excitement back into doing historical work remotely.

I have been working with ClioVis for about two years now. A digital timeline tool, ClioVis was developed by Dr. Erika Bsumek to help students visualize historical connections.

I’ve found it equally useful as a research aid. I’ve made about a dozen timelines using the software. As the ClioVis undergraduate intern, I’ve made timelines on the American Revolution, America in the World Wars, Shakespeare’s Plays, the Italian Renaissance, Angkor Wat, the Black Lives Matter movement , and many more.

For most of these timelines, I was working with a set of dates and facts that I had to translate into a visual format. The goal was to visualize the order of events and how they related to, or impacted, one another. Often, I was looking across a very long span of time, sometimes  several hundred years.

In this article, I want to introduce how I used ClioVis to dig deep into a single year. One of my best and most rewarding ClioVis experiences was for a classroom game focused exclusively around just one year in Russian history: 1877. As part of the “Reacting to the Past” series, my professor, Dr. Linda Mayhew, developed a classroom game to teach students about Russian culture and literature on the eve of revolution. Students roleplay as historical figures such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky while publishing political commentary and literature in highly competitive journals. They compete with classmates to win victory objectives relating to Russian history. Students are broken up into political factions for the duration of the game. In this game, the groups are the Westernizers, the Populists, and the Slavophiles, each with different priorities and victory conditions.

I took Dr. Mayhew’s class in the spring of 2020 and worked as a research assistant on the game’s development over the summer. To better ground students in their historical context, I worked with Dr. Mayhew to develop a series of newspaper bulletins to accompany the game. My role was to write short articles about current events in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States that took place in the year 1877.

A lot happened in 1877.  Domestic and international events combined to drive a sense of crisis. You can see that complexity immediately here, and how ClioVis enables you to link these events together.

Using this as a basis, I built newspaper bulletins such as the one below

The bulletins were intended to specifically focus on current events in 1877. This meant I needed to understand exactly what was happening domestically in Russia at the time, as well as a number of major international events. Everything from the living conditions of Russian serfs to the use of coking in British steel production was useful to me, so long as it deepened my knowledge of life in 1877.

The timeline is messy because I added a new event node each time I found information relevant to my bulletins. I started by reading about the Russo-Turkish War (which is a major event in the classroom game), and I took notes using the timeline while I read. I found articles on the major events of the war itself, so I made event nodes for the build-up to the war, key battles, and its treaty resolution. I also came across names, dates, and events that weren’t about the war at all. I made event nodes for this information, too, hoping it would lead my research in new directions.

The more I allowed the research to flow naturally, the bigger my timeline got and the richer my knowledge became. In that way, the visualization project mirrored the year itself. It grew ever more complex, and the events revealed themselves to be increasingly interconnected.

As exciting as this kind of research is, following up on every interesting lead creates an overwhelming number of articles to work through. When I do that much reading, I struggle to take the right notes and keep track of my sources. ClioVis was a huge help in that regard. Every ClioVis timeline is made up of event nodes. One can edit these in a number of ways. I used the event descriptions to pull useful quotes from articles as I read them. That way I could spend less time rereading my sources when I wrote my final articles. I would copy a paragraph or two from the article and paste it into an event’s description box in ClioVis. I would often pull multiple passages that highlighted information I knew I wanted to write about.

I drew connections when I wanted to remember how certain events were related. This creates a visual through line that tends to mirror the kind I might use in writing. I usually ended up grouping the visually connected events in a shared paragraph or article.

The last step in my research was to cite my sources. Even though I find it tedious at times, I always cite as I go. Pairing ClioVis with an auto-cite program makes the process so much easier for me. Something like EasyBib would work fine, but I switched to the browser plug-in Zotero recently. Zotero is useful because it automatically saves all of the citation information to an entry in my virtual library. That way I can come back to a text later and cite it in a different style without having to find the original source again. I copy and paste my citations from Zotero into the relevant ClioVis event so that I always know where my notes came from. This takes almost all of the effort out of citing when I’m writing later because everything is already organized.

Across my experience with this class, I found that ClioVis was a  remarkably useful tool that enabled me to deal with and visualize historical complexity. In this project, it not only allowed me to compile my research in a way that was both flexible and adapted for my project’s specific needs, but it also showcased the complexity of a single year. The sheer number of events appears overwhelming at first – how could so much have happened in such a short time frame? When one looks more carefully at the timeline, it becomes clear that many of the events are part of larger processes that were ongoing before 1877 and would continue afterwards. I’ve noticed historians often focus on these larger processes and lose some of the specificity along the way. Focusing on just one year makes the timeline detailed and personal. For me at least, it helps me remember that history is a collection of real events that shaped, and were shaped by, real people.

2020-21 will be a year marked by online learning.  As a student, I can say that it’s not the same as in person classes, but thanks to innovators like Dr Bsumek, we also have the tools to do historical research in new ways.  For a student like me, that’s exciting because it opens up new ways to view and interact with the past.   

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions. 

From the Editor: This article is part of a wider series that explores how teachers and students across the History department, the university and world more generally are responding in new ways to the unprecedented classroom environment we face in a time of global pandemic.  The goal is to share innovative resources and ideas with a focus on digital tools, scholarship and archives. This article is one of a number exploring ClioVis, an innovative digital timeline tool developed at the University of Texas at Austin by Dr Erika Bsumek. As we all struggle with online teaching and how to engage students in a virtual classroom, there is a need for reliable technology that allows students to collaborate effectively while interacting with historical sources. Here ClioVis is enormously helpful, providing students with new ways to organize complex information and to show historical inter-connections. Below Dr Bsumek is interviewed by Adam Clulow as part of Not Even Past Conversations. Although UT has a professional recording studio, this conversation, like so much today, was recorded via Zoom. It has glitches and the sound or image quality drops occasionally, but in this current moment we feel that it is more important than ever to hear directly from teachers and scholars. This interview can best be read alongside A Year in Time: The Student Experience of ClioVis and ClioVis: Description, Origin and Uses.

AC: Can you introduce ClioVis to someone who is not familiar with it?

AC: What is the inspiration for ClioVis and what problem does it set out to solve?

EB: The inspiration was twofold. ClioVis emerged from my research and my teaching.  I was researching the history of technology and I was thinking about how water and irrigation technology evolved in the 19^th century — and all the historical forces that shaped dams, irrigation ditches, and so on. People in tech build something called ‘technology trees’ to track changes from the tech side. And, technology trees are interesting, they represent the relationship between different technologies. Since I was researching dams on the Colorado Plateau I was exploring how people told the story of the evolution of that particular technology. But, I wanted to enhance my understanding of technology and include social, political, cultural and economic forces as part of the history of technology.

At the same time, I was teaching a class on the history of infrastructure in the United States and how it had transformed society. I was interested in helping my students better understand how technology evolved and how it was connected to different cultural transformation and social transformations. So I was I was trying to find a piece of technology that was like the technology tree but had a little more flexibility where students could actually look into, explore, create, build a historical timeline of how things evolved in society. I wanted them to be able to make connections and explain them. The format needed to be very flexible. So that was the inspiration. It came out of my research and my teaching.

And then there was a larger problem that I was encountering in the classroom. The key problem that ClioVis solves — or one of the key problems that it solves — is that it helps students actually connect what they’re learning, they connect specific historical events to broader social and cultural transformations. In the way the software functions, students can plot events and then make connections.  They have to actually explain the relationship between events when they create the connection. So that’s the first problem. The second problem is we get a lot of students with what I might call a skill gap at the University of Texas. Many are taught history through memorization. Historians don’t really think about history as memorization. We think about embracing complexity and trying to understand relationships between things. And so that’s the second problem that ClioVis solves.  It’s is teaching students how to think historically through their understanding of complex relationships. Learning history by thinking about relationships makes it far more interesting than memorizing a bunch of dates and facts. In the education world, it means we are taking an constructivist approach to teaching!

AC: In talking to you, I’m reminded of the kind of timelines that I know so well from high school textbooks in which they show events in a linear line. Can you talk about some of the issues with conventional timelines in terms of over-simplifying the complexity of historical events?

AC: Why are such skills especially important for students in large first year courses who are new to university and university education?

EB: There are a lot of studies that show that performance in lower division history courses – what people in education call gateway courses – are, regardless of  major, key indicators of success. And success is defined as graduation within five years.  The rate of failure or withdrawal from lower division history classes across the U.S. is extremely high. The overall average tends to be about 25% of students in the United States, meaning that we are potentially leaving behind a huge number of students by not helping them grasp the fundamentals of historical thinking.  So historical thinking turns out to be really important for success, not just in history classes, but in classes beyond history — for all majors at a college or university.

AC: And do you find that when students use ClioVis, that it changes the way they think about history?  This was my experience with students in my class. Once they start to work through these messy timelines, it creates all sorts of new questions. So they identify an event but then they start to think about what contributes to that event or what flows on from that event.

EB: That’s been really exciting for me to see students begin to embrace a new way of historical thinking. When they use ClioVis they not only plot events, they begin to see when things happened, but when they make connections they also begin to see history as a network of different events that can be connected in different ways. I see a lot of students who have just never even tought about the past in this particular way. They just are so coached through K through 12 education to think of history as a sort of series of events with specific narratives attached to them. And, those narratives can be kind of contentious. So for them to begin to plot things on their own they actively engage with the past. They’re not just reading and memorizing and giving an answer back to a teacher.  Instead they are engaging with the material, paraphrasing it, thinking about where they’re getting their evidence and they think about what that evidence is when doing this!

So we’re really teaching them about evidence based learning along the way, we are asking them to justify the connections they’re making based on the evidence that they’re using and then to consider alternative interpretations.  For many of the students that’s the first time they have done this. When they to learn history in this way its  more fun and interesting.  They find images and sound clips, they work collaboratively in groups and talk to each other. They have to decide what set of connections they’re going to use in the timeline.  They make a this kind of living thing – an interactive timeline.  They can even create a little mini-documentary along the way. They had made a product they can share with family members or friends. In my experience it has been very exciting.

AC: What has been the process of developing Cliovis?

It has been a long process and a really interesting one for me because I didn’t have any background in technology. Initially I thought I would just find some technology that did what I wanted it to do, and then I realized it wasn’t out there. So then I got a small grant from UT to build a prototype.  I worked wit SAGA Labs on campus and we built the first prototype which my students in that technology class used — and they had a great time with it.   

The students really got into it and did these wonderful in class presentations. And, then I showed their work to a few people and other people were interested in using it. So Matthew O’Hair, Ian Diaz, and Braeden Kennedy and I came up with a sort of version 1A that was a little more user friendly — and since then it’s just kind of taken off. I originally had to learn a little bit of coding. I’ve had to learn about website construction. I’ve had to learn about working with technologists who sometimes think very differently from historians. The way that they solve the problem is very different from the way that I would solve a problem so it’s been really fruitful to learn about how others think and work. It’s been an interesting experiment in cross or interdisciplinary thinking, and it turns out we have a lot to contribute to each other. It’s also a very time consuming process.

AC: What has your experience been as a historian working with and developing new technology?

EB: I think this was an interesting lesson for me as a humanist to work with people in technology. We have access to technology and it works immediately. We turn on our computers. They work.  They do the things we want them to do. We turn on our phone.  We can do all these amazing things with it. And I think people have the perception as a result the work designers have done that building and making things with technology is easy. But it’s not, especially when you’re building something from the ground up. You have to understand the limits of technology that exist and the time that goes into building that technology.  Then, you have to learn how you can surmount those problems. Then you get a product and you iterate, it’s just an iterative process continually.

OK, we did this. Now can we do that? You know, there’s a pace at which that process moves which is both a lot faster in some ways than writing a book because something is always happening. We all work on it for four weeks. And we get one feature or something that’s pretty basic. And then we think, oh, wait, but it also needs to do X, Y and Z.  And then we go back and we collectively work on it and everybody tests it out.  So it it both moves glacially slow, but also really fast at the same time, because everybody is collaborating and learning at the same time. When writing a book or an article, you are working alone. You have to piece together evidence, track it down, organize it into a narrative. It’s a lot of self-reflective work. This is a bit more dynamic – but it’s also a tremendous amount of work.

AC: How is ClioVis being used in classrooms at the moment? Perhaps in ways that you anticipated but also in some that you did not?

AC: This sounds incredibly exciting. You started with historical skills, but ClioVis has now expanded to different disciplines. So that’s bigger, more ambitious but also very exciting. What has ClioVis taught you about skills beyond the History classroom?

I think we talk a lot about critical thinking and transferable skills in academia. They have become catch phrases that we use all the time. But for me I find that this is the real thing ClioVis does, it demonstrates that  the value of critical thinking, learning how to think critically, how to organize information, how to make analytical connections transcends any one discipline. You learn how to write, how to think with evidence. All of those things are things that you use in different disciplines, which is what I think that “gateway study” tells us, right? Why are history courses are gateway courses? Because the skills that you learn there, in those courses, from mastering basic historical thinking, to learning how to communicate and convey what you’ve learned back to someone — those are skills you will use in any course across campus. And they’re also skills that you would use in any profession. So it really is like stepping students into this process, teaching them, guiding them, encouraging them along the way to become critical thinkers.

I think in the humanities we  sometimes undervalue ourselves and what we do and how it applies to the core mission of the university. But thinking about pedagogy has made me realize how important what we do really is, not only for us, but for our students across disciplines. And, that is very exciting for me. I think it I sends a message to other humanists that they should also do these kind of things – invent tools! I’ve done a lot of research into Educational Technology, which is an exploding field right now. Humanists should be at the table in these discussions, we should be at the forefront. We shouldn’t let people coming straight out of STEM be the only people inventing tech. We should be at the table in these conversations because it’s helpful for our disciplines, our students, and our educational establishments, I think, to have us there.

AC: So we can have a technology that is used on Monday in a history classroom and on Tuesday it can be used in a science classroom. It really moves us completely away from this idea of humanities skills as being different from what students learn in a STEM classroom.  Have you found that STEM students start to think differently after using ClioVis?

I think it amplifies the need to make connections. When students leave their history classes and go into their STEM classes, they can think about how a concept that they are learning about in both classes are connected, and how both influence society.  And so one of the things that I hope happens, at least with my class when I teach the history of technology is: what are the social and cultural implications of the technology that you are studying?  So there’s a great quote that I have my students read from an engineering professor in the 1960s. He’s talking about some big debates in education — and engineering education. And he says, ‘well, we could train engineers to drain the Atlantic Ocean, but we should also train them to ask:  should we do that?’  So his quote makes us think in terms of connections. What is everything connected to? Right? And what are the broader implications of new technologies?  We can make something in a in a laboratory and we can create it and test it out but what are the [potential] ethical problems?  How is it going to change society if we make it? And, I know technologists are beginning to have these debates but if we have students who think this way, it expands what we can do [as a society]. And, it demonstrates how important what we do is to the rest of the university, I think, and beyond to the rest of society.

AC: Are there any recent ClioVis projects that you found particularly exciting that you could introduce briefly to us?

Thank you for talking to me today and congratulations on the success of ClioVis.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions. 

By Adam Clulow, Editor of Not Even Past

2020 has been a difficult year. In March as COVID-19 started to spread, classes across the university were cancelled and moved online. In Fall, the university rumbled to life again but for a semester unlike any other For many of our students at the University of Texas, the transition to online classes has deprived them of access to the campus and class communities that they typically rely on even as they are forced to contend with the wide-ranging consequences of the pandemic.

For all these reasons, I am so delighted to introduce a new initiative conceived, driven and directed by students. The History department at the University of Texas at Austin has always been characterized by a culture of undergraduate research, including many exciting projects and classes profiled here. This has translated into a range of publication initiatives. Professor Emilio Zamora’s students in HIS 320R, “Texas, 1914 to the Present,” wrote articles on Mexican Americans in Texas that have been published in the Handbook of Texas Online while in 2014 Professor Juliet E. K. Walker founded the Undergraduate Journal of Black Business History. But the department has never had a single outlet for undergraduate research spanning the discipline as a whole. In 2020, this will change with the launch of Past in Process, a dedicated undergraduate historical studies journal.

At its core are three students, Ananya Dwivedi, Carson Coronado, and Grace Goodman . Their hope is that Past in Process will provide a vehicle to publish great student research that is compelling, engaging and significant. Ananya is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Carson is the Managing Editor and Grace will take on the role as Lead Editor. Detailed profiles of Ananya, Carson and Grace can be seen at the end of this article.

Past in Process was created for a range of reasons. Ananya explains that “We created Past in Process to promote and lift up diverse voices. We aim to create an opportunity for undergraduate students across disciplines and areas to engage with history and to publish their research in different formats. I was inspired by the passion demonstrated by my peers in the History department, as well as the need to understand how history affects every facet of life in the current moment.” The journal’s mission statement is as follows:

Past in Process seeks to draw contributions from historical studies broadly defined. In so doing it aims to bend the idea of what historical research means. Equally important it will create a sense of community even as the pandemic has robbed students of so much of the standard campus and academic experience.

Past in Process commenced recruiting for a range of positions in August. The response was overwhelming. More than 60 students responded to the initial call for applications and Ananya and Carson recruited more than 20 students to various roles in the journal. In the short interview included below, Ananya and Carson introduce themselves while laying out their vision for the journal.

Past in Process coincides with the official start date of the department’s new chair, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, who has been an enthusiastic supporter of the journal from beginning. This initiative is also supported by Dr. Madeline Hsu, the Associate Chair, and Dr. Lina del Castillo, the Phi Alpha Theta Faculty Advisor.

For Dr. Del Castillo, Past in Process represents a “needed and welcome space for students to voice their encounters with the past in ways that may allow us to access the richness, diversity, and complexity of the human experience.” It draws on the unique strengths of the department: its size, its research reach, its culture of undergraduate research and its online presence.

As editor of Not Even Past, I am especially delighted to announce a new collaboration between our platform, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, and Past in Process. In addition to longer pieces of student research, Past in Process will also feature shorter 1000 word articles adapted to the format of Not Even Past and the two platforms will combine to promote and publish the best undergraduate research.

2020 is a difficult year but it is impossible not to be inspired by Ananya, Grace and Carson as well as all the students involved in the journal. Together they are working to create new communities of scholarship while generating rigorous and groundbreaking research.

Journal Staff

Ananya Dwivedi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief (2020-2021) of Past in Process 

I am a senior studying History and Economics here at the University of Texas at Austin. I was born in Chandigarh, India, but have lived outside of India since I was forty days old, moving around the globe from India to Singapore to Taiwan to the US. My historical focus is on South Asian colonial history and understanding how the colonial past of this area affects the development and trade policy of South Asia today. I also have an interest in Ancient Roman history, particularly the Republic and Julio-Claudian trade policy and relations.

Carson Coronado, Managing Editor (2020-2021) of Past in Process

I am a senior, earning degrees in Liberal Arts Honors History and Business at the University of Texas at Austin with minors in Spanish and Latin. I was born and grew up in Austin, Texas. In 2019, I was a Normandy Scholar and am currently the president of UT’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honorary. My historical focus is Late Antiquity, medieval Spain and colonial Latin America. I am especially interested in the history of cultural borderlands and the exchange of ideas, resources, languages, and laws. I believe that the study of these exchanges can help improve our understanding of modern globalization.

Grace Goodman, Lead Editor (2020-2021) of Past in Process

I am a junior studying Classics and Ancient History at the University of Texas at Austin. I was born, raised, and started college in Corpus Christi, Texas. I came to UT in 2018 to study Computer Science, but I quickly moved on to ancient history and classical literature. My historical focus is in Classical religion and politics, specifically how the two areas of ancient culture intermingled and evolved to their modern connection. I am also pursuing UTeach: Liberal Arts certification in Latin pedagogy and a Bridging Disciplines Program certificate in Digital Arts and Media. I believe that ancient history has a tremendous historical impact on modern civilization and that modern historians should study history with an ever-evolving magnifying glass.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.