Over the last several years the great folks at several universities deeply committed to digital work have produced two of the most useful production tools, Omeka and Neatline. These two pieces of an essential digital toolbox allow for users to build and display digital creations of humanities, but especially history.
Omeka is an open source tool that gives users the ability to build digital collections. Using a simple yet robust interface, Omeka allows users to build websites that draw from digital archives of material large or small. It is usable and manageable. Most importantly for many scholars, it does not require deep programming knowledge to use nor does it expect a large collection to be mediated through its servers. Omeka is both usable as a downloadable version onto servers or can be used as Omeka.net will host user uploaded content. Created by the Center for History and New Media through George Mason University, Omeka may be the most important foundation for digital humanists and historians on the internet. But that is not all.
At it’s core, Omeka is a foundation on which other projects can be created. In the last few days, the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia released Neatline – a way to extend a collection hosted through Omeka to display in both space and time. Using what appears to be a modification of Exhibit, a product of the Simile projects at M.I.T. labs, Neatline integrates the display of information through time and space – using an interlaced Timeline and Google Maps display along with pop-up bubbles. I have used Exhibit to create numerous projects, especially for the Railroads and the Making of Modern America project, all of which required me to relearn the coding process for building displays. I knew that Exhibit was the easiest tool to use for what we needed it to do – integrate timelines with maps. What Exhibit wanted to do, Neatline perfects. It is now exceedingly easy to build a mediated collection of digital history items that can be displayed however the user desires online. Neatline is simple to get started and robust enough to display content as the user sees fit. It is easy to use, something Exhibit attempted but struggled with.
Using Omeka to build a collection of material, no matter the size, and combining it with Neatline’s display possibilities would allow scholars of all levels to demonstrate their work in new ways, extending understanding and user interaction in ways text simply cannot. I cannot wait to build with Omeka and Neatline together and see what I can do.