The R&D team here at the lab has been quiet over the course of the last couple weeks, but there’s been a flurry of activity under the surface – we’ve been hard at work putting the finishing touches on Neatline, a geotemporal exhibit-building framework that makes it possible to plot archival collections, narratives, texts, and concepts on interactive maps and timelines.
Neatline is built as a collection of plugins for Omeka, a digital archive-building framework developed by our partners at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. If you already have an Omeka collection, Neatline provides a deeply integrated, plug-and-play mapping solution that lets you create interpretive views on your archive. If you don’t have an Omeka collection, though (or if it doesn’t make sense represent your material as a collection of archival objects), Neatline can also be used as an effectively standalone application from within the Omeka administrative interface.
If you haven’t been following the project, check out the podcast of the workshop that Eric Rochester and I gave at THATCamp Virginia 2012 and read the announcement about our partnership with RRCHNM.
So, what kinds of things can you do with Neatline? Here are a few:
Watch this space in the first week of July for the full public release with the dedicated website, code, documentation, and a hosted “sandbox” version of the application that will let you register and experiment with creating exhibits before downloading the software.
Until then, here are a handful of screenshots from some of the demo exhibits we’re working on:
