The Scholars’ Lab is proud to announce the launch of Neatline, a set of Omeka plugins for hand-crafted geo-temporal visualization and interpretation.

1.0 versions of the software are available at:

http://neatline.org/

-- where you can also see sample exhibits, play in the sandbox, and read more about our project, including news and history. Currently available are Neatline itself, Neatline Maps (an add-on for incorporating georeferenced historical maps and other web services), and stand-alone versions of our Neatline Features and Neatline Time plugins.

Neatline is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps and narrative sequences from collections of archives and artifacts in Omeka, and to connect your maps and narratives with timelines that are more-than-usually sensitive to ambiguity and nuance. In other words, Neatline lets you make hand-crafted, interactive stories as interpretive expressions of an archival or cultural heritage collection. This project is more about graphesis and humanities interpretation than about GIS analysis and algorithmic data visualization. Ours is a small-data approach in a big data world.

Stay tuned to the Scholars’ Lab blog (http://scholarslab.org/) and to our news feed at http://neatline.org for a series of posts and screencasts to be shared over the course of the next two weeks. We’ll be providing support for our open-source software on the Omeka forums and dev list -- and presenting the project at DH 2012 in Hamburg.

Neatline has been supported by generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the IMLS, and the Library of Congress.  The Scholars' Lab is a department of the University of Virginia Library.