Getting started as a historian
What a study, a trail and a stop are, how they fit together, and what you'll do in Suburb Historian, before you open it for the first time.
- Nothing yet. This is the map before you set off.
Suburb Historian is where a local historian turns research into a trail that people can walk. It has a handful of ideas that the rest of the guides take for granted. This page explains them once, in plain words, so nothing else catches you off guard.
The big picture
Everything nests inside the thing above it:
- Suburb The place you're researching
- Study Your research into that suburb
- Trail One walk, about one person or event
- Stop One place on that walk
You can run more than one study for a suburb. A study holds one or more trails. A trail is a list of stops in walking order.
Suburbs
You start from a map. Search for your suburb (with its state, since lots of places share a name) and the map moves there. Trails other people have published show up as pins, so you can see what’s already been told before you add to it.
Studies
A study is the research behind a suburb: the notes, the sources and the trails that come out of it. It’s your workspace. Studies are listed in a column on the left of the map, and you can have several.
There are two ways to begin one:
- Let the AI do the first pass. You choose a suburb and, if you like, a theme or era. Suburb Historian searches the historical record, suggests some trails, and, once you’ve checked what it found, writes a first draft of every stop. You review it at each point, and it never publishes anything on its own.
- Start empty and write it yourself. Tick Opt out of AI and you get a blank study. Every word on the trail is yours.
Either way, the result is the same kind of thing: trails and stops you can edit.
Trails
A trail is one short walk that tells the story of a single person or event, from one stop to the next. It has a title, a description, and its stops. A study can hold several trails, perhaps one for each of the stories your suburb has to tell.
Stops
A stop is a single place on a trail. Each one is made up of a few parts:
- Chapter title: a short name for this part of the story.
- Story: what the walker hears when they arrive. This is where the history lives.
- Approach story: told while they walk towards this stop from the last one. It’s a good place for directions and a hint of what’s coming.
- Location: the pin on the map.
- Photos: a picture of the place, or of the people in the story.
Stops are also where you credit your sources, so a walker who enjoys a chapter can see where to read more.
Draft, Walk Score, Publish
A trail stays a private draft until you decide otherwise. Nobody else can see it.
Each trail carries a Walk Score: a coloured light showing how ready it is, with a dot for each thing it checks, such as photos, locations and the distance between stops. 🟢 means ready, 🟡 means worth another look but nothing’s broken, and 🔴 means something needs fixing before walkers should see it. A first draft often shows red. That’s normal, and the dots show you what to do.
When you’re happy, you Publish, and the trail appears on Story Trail’s map for walkers to find.
Working with others, and with Claude
If you’re part of a historical society, a study can be shared so several of you can work on it. And if you use Claude, you can connect Story Trail so you can ask it to read, tidy and publish your studies by chatting. There’s a guide for that too.