for the opportunity to present some newly released software to you today.
Neatline was just released about two weeks ago, and it's 1.0 form.
So the bloom for us is not yet off the rose, and we're all, you know,
pretty excited to have the opportunity to share it with you.
Neatline is a tool for geotemporal interpretation of archival collections,
but really of humanities materials.
So archival collections, museum and material culture collections,
and increasingly narratives and other sorts of works of literature and art.
I need to give our grateful acknowledgment to our funders.
The National Endowment for the Humanities allowed us to begin this project
with a startup grant, which we then moved on to two years of funding
from the Library of Congress in the U.S. for the project.
So as you can tell, my voice is just about gone.
I am going to give a briefer sort of framing of the project
that I might have otherwise, and then turn things over to David McClure,
who was the lead developer on the project.
Several others of us from the Scholars Lab contributed significantly to this.
So David is really going to be speaking on behalf of the whole group.
I want to frame the project by sharing with you two sets of decision-making
that we went through in putting Neatline together,
one pragmatic and one conceptual or theoretical.
The pragmatic decision happened around the time of the initial startup grant from NEH.
We pitched the project at first as a stand-alone tool,
but over the course of the startup grant realized that we could do so much more
if we reconceived it as a set of modular plug-ins
for an existing open source content management system called Omeka.
And so that is what we did.
So there was that first move of sort of thinking of Neatline.
I think it just fell asleep.
I think we're good.
Thinking of Neatline as something that would be a single downloadable installable tool
to thinking of it as a set of mix and match approaches.
So really a liberating kind of thing for our users, we think.
And David may have an opportunity to talk more about that.
The second set of decisions were more conceptual or theoretical.
And here is where we saw an opportunity to make a small intervention
into the scene of information visualization in the humanities right now,
particularly around timelines and maps.
It's becoming increasingly easy to algorithmically populate timelines and maps.
But we hold with William Morris that you can't have art without resistance in the materials.
And so we wanted to create a tool that would promote a more handcrafted kind
of information visualization.
There we were thinking of some of the past work that I've done on projects like temporal modeling
and the Ivanhoe game, really drawing on Johanna Drucker's notion of graph thesis.
That is knowledge or meaning making through iterative graphical sketching.
So drawing as a way of knowing, if you will.
So with that, I'll turn it over to David McClure, who's going to show you what the
products of the tool can look like.
It's really a framework.
So there are a lot of different things that people can do with this project.
And he'll also be giving you a look at the administrative interface for new one.
Okay, can you guys hear me?
Thanks, Bethany.
My name is David McClure.
I'm one of the developers on the Neatline project.
Today what I'm going to do is provide a general overview of how Neatline fits into a mecca
content management ecosystem and what you can do with Neatline, the kinds of projects
it might be good for in the process of creating Neatline exhibits and populating content on
maps and timelines.
Let me just get this squeezed in here.
Okay, so just to give sort of a general example of the type of project that Neatline is good
for, at the special collections library at the University of Virginia, we have a collection
of the correspondence and maps of a Civil War cartographer named Jedidiah Hotchkiss.
So Hotchkiss was attached to the Confederate army.
He made some of the first, these sort of beautiful, very aesthetically interesting maps of the
Shenandoah Valley.
He's one of the first people to ever really systematically map the area.
The sort of special collections library at UVA has a collection of his maps and a large
collection of correspondence that stretches over the course of almost his entire life.
So some of the most striking maps that are in the collection are a collection of three
maps from the Battle of Chancellorsville, which was fought in May of 1863.
And so what these maps entail is he sort of, he printed the exact same map three separate
times and then kind of in colored pencil went through and sketched in the positions
of these various troops and kind of outlined the movement of the battle and sort of annotated
these base maps with his understanding of how the battle unfolded.
So what we did is we took those maps and got them scanned with a sort of high resolution
scanner and then brought them into the sort of the basic default Omeka administrative
interface.
So if you haven't used Omeka before, you can think of Omeka as sort of, it's kind of like
a combination of WordPress or Drupal, but really designed for the use of an academic
or an archivist.
It treats standards compliant, double and core metadata as the sort of central organizing
data structure in the system.
So what we did to sort of start out and kind of create a sort of high quality kind of metadata
foundation to build the exhibit on top of, we took the scanned images of these three
maps and created them as these sort of three items in our collection.
So each of these three, you know, if I click through to it, contains sort of a fully built
out, you know, double and core metadata record, in this case just with some basic sort of
description about what's going on, kind of, you know, annotations that were populated
by the original archivist that built this collection.
So we have the static scan here and then down at the bottom you can see that we've taken
this sort of flat image scan of the map and we've georeferenced it against a real geography
base layer which is not sort of visible in this specific view.
So we have these three kind of, you know, double and core records that represent the
kind of canonical representations of these maps.
So the thing that Neatline is really, you know, sort of tries to do is once you have
this foundation, how do you kind of stage your understanding of what these maps are?
You know, I mean, there's a huge amount of sort of implicit and explicit geospatial
information that Hotchkiss kind of grafted on top of these maps.
So how do you kind of take these, you know, archival entities and really sort of stage
them in a really interactive and expressive way?
So Neatline does that by making it possible to bring these sort of foundational archival
elements into a very kind of interactive and dynamic environment where you can build out
these exhibits that sort of plot archival objects on maps, on timelines, and then let
you sort of draw on very complex sort of structurally creative additions onto the maps.
So here this is kind of a basic Neatline exhibit where there are three view ports.
There's the sort of main map area, a timeline up top, and then over on the right sort of
a record browser pane that provides kind of waypoints to guide you through the exhibit.
And I'll show you in a little while all of these blocks are configurable.
They can be toggled on and off, and it's very flexible.
So on the sort of on the map itself, if you come in and sort of highlight any of these
vectors that I've, you know, grafted on top of the map to sort of enhance the foundation
that's there, you get sort of a little pop-up bubble if there's information about it.
If you click, you get more information.
We made these bubbles really flexible so that if you have long format content, for example,
let me come over here.
So in this case, I have a big picture and, you know, a whole bunch of sort of, you know,
kind of the first part of an interpretive essay about this collection of maps.
The bubbles sort of scale and kind of fit onto the screen to make it possible to really
unfold complex and sort of long format content.
Okay, so you can see that I've gone through here, and so this day in the Civil War, you
know, was sort of a famous day from a military history standpoint because one of the Confederate
generals executed this very sort of risky flanking march around the Union position.
So to kind of, you know, demonstrate that movement, to kind of stage that action on
the map, we've drawn out these very sort of, you know, interpretive flexible arrows showing
the kind of the arc of this march, you know, kind of where, you know, sort of where he
went around this position.
This is especially interesting from a Hotchkiss standpoint because Hotchkiss personally was
responsible for sort of finding the root of this march and sort of he was behind the,
you know, the sort of this maneuver.
Okay, so I've gone through and I've drawn on these pieces of information, you know,
a lot of kind of annotations about where things are happening, you know, the specific, you
know, kind of elements that Hotchkiss points out, I sort of elaborate and kind of expand
on.
You can also see that I've sort of formalized a kind of physical narrative on the map with
these numbered waypoints.
So in addition to, you know, the sort of spatial vectors, I've also dropped these kind of narrative
waypoints that contain, you know, about a sort of two or three thousand word sort of
narrative about the map sort of broken up into pieces.
Okay, so this is sort of Neatline kind of a temporally sort of, you know, cross-sectional,
you know, presentation of a map.
It's, you know, one map about one day.
The other big sort of strength and power of Neatline is that it lets you present things
as they change over time by setting visibility sort of thresholds for any item in the exhibit.
So up here at the top on the timeline, we've got these three days kind of plotted out.
So this is the map for May 2nd.
If I drag the timeline over, then the whole exhibit switches out and the new map is sort
of loaded onto the screen.
You can see, too, that the entire set of, you know, sort of spatial annotations and
the waypoint data over on the right switches out in unison with the moving map.
So you can sort of curate these batches of records and elements in the exhibit that kind
of behave in concert and sort of, you know, move in and out in the same way.
Okay, and then so, you know, on this map, I've done the same thing.
I've, you know, gone through and kind of sketched on these, you know, sort of narrative waypoints
onto the map.
You can, you know, come in and sort of...
Let me get my zoom bar here.
The user can zoom in, you know, and get a lot more sort of detail about this stuff.
You can do very sort of finely, you know, constructed vectors and, you know, any really
any kind of imaginable sort of structural addition to the map.
And then likewise, the NFI, you know, scroll to the May 4th, I get the whole new set of
a whole new map and the maps are a little slow here coming under the ocean sometimes.
But yeah, so you get, you know, sort of a whole new exhibit for every day.
And then the other sort of big, you know, sort of basic functionality that's here is
once you have...
You've plotted things on the map, plotted things on the timeline and on this sort of
browser pane, all of the elements are interlinked.
So if you...
Let me see if I can get the map to pop back up here.
Yeah, it's sort of a...
I've been having trouble with this.
So if you, you know, come over here and click on anything on one of these viewports, if
that viewport has or if that element in the exhibit has an instantiation anywhere else
in the exhibit, the other viewports will kind of update and focus on the corresponding piece
of information.
So if I click here, then I can sort of zoom to that location on the map that that specific
entity is, you know, pertains to.
Likewise, and it's not sort of wired up in this example because it's not necessary, but
if I had something on the timeline that corresponded to a specific location on the map, if I clicked
on the timeline, the map would sort of zoom to that place and vice versa in all directions.
Okay, so this is sort of a good example of a pretty kind of basic exhibit that's, you
know, taking three maps and sort of, you know, kind of glossing them up and expanding
on them.
Neelan is also sort of designed to allow for more kind of expressive and kind of experimental
exhibits that might not necessarily hue, you know, so closely this sort of, you know, basic
default sort of map structure.
So an example of that, again, sort of working with this collection of the correspondents
and maps of Jedidiah Hotchkiss, Bethany, a number of years ago, found a fascinating letter
in this collection that was written about four or five days after the Battle of Fredericksburg
in which Hotchkiss is writing home to his daughter Nellie, who lived in sort of another town
of Virginia about a hundred miles away.
And it starts out as a very kind of, you know, normal sort of sweet, you know, letter about,
you know, sort of where he's camped, about the natural environment around his campsite.
And then quickly sort of on the third page, it sort of, he kind of stops and describes
the battle, which was, you know, this unbelievably sort of, you know, atrocious affair that had
played out, you know, a week before.
So and then the fascinating thing is that at the exact same time that he was working
for the Confederate Army to produce kind of official battle maps about this, about the
battle, he sketched in this sort of just, you know, improvised little sketch at the
bottom of this, you know, this page on the letter.
So we thought this was fascinating.
He had actually just sort of, you know, it was his kind of least common denominator take,
you know, on his professional work, sort of filtered through this, you know, letter
to his daughter at home.
So what we did here is we took the actual section of the third page of the letter that
contained the map and sort of split it off from the rest of the letter, rotated it around
and geo-rectified it accurately on the sort of modern geography map.
And we were surprised to find that the orientation was so off because in almost all of the other
sort of professional, official maps that Hostius drew of this area, he either drew them sort
of oriented normally sort of north-south or in a different sort of opposite horizontal
orientation.
So I think this is, you know, the only one I could find where he actually sketched at
that angle, which is kind of interesting.
Okay, so what we did to sort of present this letter to kind of stage, you know, it's this
incredibly rich letter that describes, you know, this battle.
It makes reference to dozens of locations around the area, sort of, you know, describes his
trip from his home back to the Confederate army.
So you know, we took the actual letter here and sort of geo-rectified and, you know, sort
of, you know, sort of an aesthetic sense that the pages of the letter plastered them around
the actual rectified portion of the, you know, the letter that contains the map.
And so then we went through and for, let me zoom in here, we went through and actually
transcribed the letter.
So you can sort of go through and hover on each of the, you know, paragraphs in the actual
text, click and get the transcription for that letter.
And then over on, and you can see, too, that in places where Hotchkiss makes reference to,
you know, geographic locations around the area, we sort of outlined them in the letter.
And then if you zoom way back here, you can sort of trace out Hotchkiss's, you know, route
from his home over here in Churchville, sort of over the Blue Ridge Mountain.
He mentions, you know, the city orange right here, and then eventually he meets up with
the Confederate Army, you know, sort of around here, and then wrote the letter from this
little bend in the river there.
All right.
So let me get back in.
Okay.
So we went through and actually transcribed the letter.
And then over on the portion that contains the battle sketch, sorry, let me scoot back
over.
And again, let me apologize for the slow loads here on the maps.
Okay.
Well, let me just finish up quickly with this.
So again, sorry, the map is not filling in here.
So we, you know, we populated the, we sort of drew annotations on the battle sketch and
sort of, you know, explained what was going on.
And then the really interesting thing is that we then connected it with, it's frustrating,
I can't show this here, we actually sort of overlaid it with an official map of the exact
same, you know, battle that sort of shows the same events.
You can go back and forth and sort of toggle between the two, you know, sort of sets of
annotations and compare the two maps and really see how they, you know, how Hotchkiss kind
of collapsed down his sort of professional activities.
Okay.
There we go.
So here's the battle sketch.
And then when I pull back, let's see here.
So here's Hotchkiss's sketch.
And yeah, so then there is the sort of official battle map that, you know, was produced formally
for the army.
We've gone through and sort of, you know, described the sort of actual events that Hotchkiss
eludes to in the letter in a very sort of casual way.
Okay.
So those two examples of Neatline exhibits.
Let me very quickly show the sort of backend environment that you would use to build one
of these.
So that's kind of the final, the final unit that, you know, a public visitor would see.
The really sort of one of the, really the kind of the core of Neatline from a software engineering
standpoint is the editing environment that lets you build this stuff.
And basically it's organized is, so this is the backend for that first exhibit.
Every single thing in the exhibit, whether it's, you know, a vector on the map, a entry
in the timeline or something listed over in that pane over there, is sort of a record
in the Neatline exhibit.
The record is kind of the first class sort of the unit of content in Neatline.
So you can see that you have the exact same kind of, you know, representation of the exhibit
over on the right.
On the left, you have this added sort of content management pane where you can see sort of
a listing of all the records you've created for this exhibit.
When you open up one of these, you get this form that's used to sort of describe the record.
You can add, you know, title, description.
If the record corresponds to a metadata item in your Omeka collection, that sort of, the
DC information, it can be automatically pulled in and sort of used, you know, without modification
inside of Neatline.
These records right here, you can also just sort of add individual one-off records if
you want to just do very sort of contextual editions inside of the exhibit.
Yeah, so you can do, you know, basic text description.
You can, you know, configure if you want there to be a pop-up bubble or not.
Over in the temporal field set, you can set the start date and end date.
And those correspond to the actual kind of plotted positions of the item on the timeline.
You can also set start visible and end visible dates.
If those are set, then the item will only be rendered on the map when the timeline,
the user sort of scrolled the timeline to a position within that interval.
You can also drag out a sort of ambiguity setting on the timeline.
So you can, you know, if you want to represent sort of a progression upwards into an event
or kind of a downward following movement, you can sort of, you know, kind of block that
out with these sliders to sort of cast a gradient across the span.
And then you also have really sophisticated control over the appearance of all the vectors
on the map and on the timeline.
So you can see in this exhibit, you know, there's, you know, these sort of two color schemes
to map onto the two, you know, the two armies.
You can set those, the sort of the shape color, the color of the lines, the opacities
of the shapes, the sort of widths of the stroke lines that are around the vectors.
And then you can also, in sort of a bit sort of more complex content management construct,
is you can set parent records.
You can create sort of hierarchical relationships among any of the records in the exhibit.
And if you do that, so in this case, I've set this to point to this kind of abstract
content management record called May 2nd Waypoints.
If you do that, then the child record right here will inherit all of the styling and visibility
information of the parent, however high up it takes for the application to find a setting.
So what that means is that you can create these very complex sort of chains of inheritance
and let you kind of, you know, define common style sets, common visibility settings that
let us do the kind of stuff where you scroll the timeline and have a huge kind of chunk
of, you know, maybe 40 or 50 vectors come on or off as you move back and forth.
So it's a very, you know, it tries to be a system that tries to balance, we tried to
make it, you know, accessible enough and kind of, you know, easy to understand as
sort of a GUI application, but also to make it scalable and kind of flexible in a way
that it can be, you know, modified and sort of deployed in creative ways if you, you know,
there's a more complex project that doesn't fit into the sort of default loadout.
Yeah, sure.
So you can also, you can control the sort of position of the blocks in the exhibit.
So if I wanted to, you know, make the timeline a bit taller, I could just drag it down like
that.
I can switch the positions of the blocks to pull that over to the side, save that, and
then that'll be, you know, over on the other side.
So you can do sort of, you know, basic kind of templating and layout functionality right
inside of the editor.
You can also toggle things on and off.
If I wanted just to have, you know, the map be full screen, I could turn those off and
the map would then fill the entire available space.
Yeah, so we, the software was launched about two weeks ago.
Getting the maps going out here.
We are, you know, sort of still working on it, still trying to kind of, you know, find
really the sort of use cases that people are most interested in and figure out what features
would be, you know, sort of good to support that kind of stuff.
Just kind of general direction for possible feature development.
We've done some kind of sketch work and sort of a research sense of connecting neat line
exhibits with actual prose text.
So if you had, you know, a long format text and you wanted to associate a sentence with
a particular, you know, location in the exhibit, you could kind of link those up and let the
user sort of click back and forth between the text and the exhibit.
Yeah, and so, you know, it's available at neatline.org.
And if you're a developer, you can go to the code that's hosted on GitHub.
And we'd definitely love to hear sort of feedback about how it's working.
So probably the last thing to say is that there is 145 buttons to follow this functionality,
but if you are only interested in time, you're only interested in an app that you should
use.
Thanks.