What do you get when you cross archival metadata with timelines, slippy maps, and an appreciation for the interpretive aims of humanities scholarship?
Neatline is a set of tools for the creation of interlinked maps and timelines as interpretive expressions of archival collections. It promotes collaboration by libraries and cultural heritage institutions with scholarly end-users, who will build on standard metadata to produce rich, evocative—even theoretical—geospatial and temporal visualizations of the textual content of catalogued letters and manuscripts. It builds on robust, open standards and services, and aims to provide a seamless, out-of-the-box experience for users without deep Web development skills. Neatline produces simple, reliable, Web-based tool that scholars may use to model the intellectual content of archival collections in time and space. These tools include:
- Omeka: a popular PHP application for the presentation of archival collections that will store information about primary resources, historical maps and the geospatial features they reference. The scholar will enter information into the database by means of simple, customizable Web-forms.
- GeoServer: a GIS server that will translate data held in Omeka and in raster-imagery (such as scanned historical maps) into Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-standard Web services.
- OpenLayers: a JavaScript toolkit that combines OGC services to create powerful interactive maps served on the Web. It will provide both visualization capability and (by means of a simple spatial data editor we plan to create) the ability for scholars to enter GIS data into the Neatline database along with ordinary structured information.
- Timeline: a Web Widget for visualizing temporal data.
Neatline is therefore a geo-temporal framework for fruitful interchange among scholars and the stewards of primary resources, and we offer this framework as a contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular.
Special thanks to the University of Virginia Library.