Draft:ClioVis

ClioVis is an educational technology startup company based in Austin, Texas, and affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin. ClioVis is a unique visualization tool focused on the interactive development of interactive timelines and mind-maps. Created by history professor and founder Dr. Erika Bsumek, it has been widely used in history and humanities courses but also has applications across the educational and genealogy spaces, in disciplines in the social sciences and natural sciences. The name derives from Clio, the Greek muse of history, and Vis for visualization.

History
Cliovis, the company, was started in 2018 by Erika Bsumek and Matthew O’Hair (who left in 2021) and was incorporated in (2023). The company has received funding from Softeq Venture Fund, and friends and family funding. The platform has grown to support more than 25K users from its inception to 2024. The company has established working relationships with instructors at approximately 25 universities and a number of other educational organizations (museums, historic preservation offices, etc.) and has integrated the software into learning management systems like Canvas and Blackboard.

In 2021, ClioVis won a Crowd Choice Award in the KSW Female Founders Competition. The year before it received an Editor’s Choice designation from Digital Humanities Now. It has also been named a Critical Literacy Technology by UT System. The software was originally developed in collaboration between Dr. Bsumek, the University of Texas at Austin’s Simulation and Game Applications (SAGA) lab and funding from a Provost’s Teaching Fellowship and the College of Liberal Arts.

The platform has received overall positive reviews from students, pedagogues and organizations in the United States like Professor Lindsey Passenger Wieck from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and the Journal of American History. Wieck, for instance, noted that “ClioVis goes above and beyond these other tools in a few big ways: it’s much more interactive and allows users to create connections between items the interface is very easy to use it’s easy for students to collaborate in groups.” She compared the tool to TimelineJS and noted how much easier to use it is. However, other reviewers have noted that the platform has room for improvement in the timeline builder, website design, and one reviewer lamented the absence of a technical notes sections of the website to understand the programming framework of ClioVis.

Use
ClioVis combines the best features of timeline, mind mapping and network visualization tools to help users collaborate on projects, better understand and organize their research and educational materials, and present their findings to external audiences. It specifically:

1.	Teaches students how to create highly customizable events (or nodes) and connections (arrows) to draw relationships between them. This experience includes categorization of events according to assignments or preferences, justifying the connections they make, and the creation of eras to group events under certain periods or parameters. Events are compatible with multimedia formats such as audio clips, videos and images. 2.	Focuses on evidenced-based learning, stressing citation of sources for each event created. Students cannot add an event to the timeline unless they have a source, reinforcing the importance of evidence in academic work. 3.	Foster public speaking and presentation skills by allowing students to export their materials in multiple formats (docxs, xlsx, ppt), visualize content through different modalities, or directly present in the classroom from the platform. 4.	Encourages collaboration enabling team members to work together in real time in the development of timelines through the chatbox feature, facilitating collaborative learning and project management. 5.	Includes a connection maker, students have to explain why they connected specific events and cite their sources. 6.	Provides a host of other different tools for educators such as the Geneaology Generator, which taps into genealogy databases to instantaneously create family trees; the Syllabus Generator, which creates syllabi with just brief inputs of information; the List of Digital Archive, a compendium of eighty-six archives with substantial digitized materials available to supplement ClioVis assignment in class.

For educators

***Copyright Violation Redacted*** For researchers

***Copyright Violation Redacted***

In the words of its founder, ClioVis exists to facilitate the understanding of the “why” of history, not only the “when.” It enables higher-level analytical thinking, a skillset to master for any graduating student and a critical asset for an informed and free society. ClioVis is an example of new pedagogic approaches that are “immersive, collaborative and hands-on” in the 21st century.

ClioVis operates on a paid subscription model with several tiers, including free, premium, enterprise and group plans.