by Website link: https://www.theclio.com/
From my exploration and use of Clio, the program seems to act as a guide for different histories and cultures around a given area. From it’s description, they boast having 39,124 historical entries from across the United States. Serving as an educational website, Clio displays historical and cultural sites throughout the country, including nature trails, art walking tours, and virtual tours of museums and sites. Clio’s aim seems to focus on its users discovering local sites, museums, monuments, and other cultural landmarks to go over the significance and historical events that occurred around them. For professional historians and scholars, the focus on local history allows them and their students to publish different digital humanities scholarships using an innovative digital format while also circumnavigating entries in an open digital environment.
While messing around with the program, I started by looking around the state of Virginia, where I currently live and attend graduate school at. While none of scholarship was within the immediate area, there was a surprisingly number of entries near the Virginia-West Virginia border. The first entry I clicked on was the Wardensville Garden Market entry. The entry was full of information, ranging from standard texts, audio logs, images, directions, and a 3D Google map of the nearby area. All the basic information I need is there and can be easily accessed at any time. Going through other entries, the simplicity, basic information, and ease of use can give any historian or viewer interest in visiting an area to study or experience.
However, Clio goes beyond just clicking on an interactive map. As mentioned before, scholars can make entries in the program as well. The program provides a wide variety of tools for people new to the program to easily explore and create new entries. For example, the program provides a “Guides, Videos, and Rubrics” tab, which provides simple and concise instruction on how to implement new entries into the program. The program also provides two sets of entries for users to implement, consisting of new “entries” and “tours,” that provide different experiences depending on which is utilized for a given scholarship. Lastly, Clio interestingly provides tabs that implement the program in different ways, such as classrooms, museums, and historical preservations.
Clio stands out to me due to its reliance on place-based techniques. The concept of these techniques come from place-based learning that puts the “place” (in this case, a cultural or historical site) at the center of the story that the historian or blogger is trying to portray to the viewer. The techniques provided allows the user to freely learn what they want to and add new things to a given area. These place-based learning techniques basically serve as a model to connect and increase the engagement of education for all generations, especially the younger and technologically-reliant generations.
However, it does raise the question of why place-based learning is engaging? I believe the answer is simple: control. Interactivity and user control are important components when creating a digital history program that wants to keep their users engaged. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, place-based techniques allows the user to control what they want to learn at their own pace. In Clio, the emphasis on simplicity and ease of use of their digital tools serve as the catalyst for user control. Not only can the user interact with the map, but they can add to it with proper scholarship and data for others to see as well.
In conclusion, Clio is a digital history program that focuses on map-based interactive user control to act as a guide for different histories and cultures around a given area. Their aim of creating an interactive learning environment revolving around place-based techniques and research can all be used to make teaching and learning public history more engaging. It’s ease of use and simple tutorials create an environment for any new user to navigate or add to the program. For digital public history, Clio serves as a good stepping stone for other digital history programs to follow, whether creating a map-based or other digital program.
