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Banner: RDDS; Research Data & Digital Scholarship displayed between 3D mesh surfaces

Omeka: Neatline

A Guide to Omeka, a web publishing platform for web content management and exhibits.

Neatline

What is Neatline?

"Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation."

Check out some Penn Neatline Projects below!


Getting Neatline

Neatline is a plugin that can be installed. To learn more about plugins, visit the Using Omeka tab.


Neatline Widgets & Themes

These expansions of Neatline can be added through the Escher plugin. To learn more about plugins, visit the Using Omeka tab.

  • Simile Timeline - Add timelines to your map.
  • Neatline Text - Connect a body of segments of a body of text to points on your map
  • Waypoints - Add a navigation menu to your mapped journey to create a linear storyline

Penn Neatline Project Showcase

Paris sous l'Occupation - A Neatline Archive

Paris sous l'Occupation - A Neatline Archive

The pedagogical goals of this project are to engage students deeper in their attempt to understand a dark episode of history

  • By facilitating their navigation through the time period: one space where they will have access to many different texts related to the same story, from many different angles.
  • By confronting them with events that took place in a landscape that still exists today; in other words, by connecting the past to the present.
  • By interweaving texts, videos and biographical data in order to link the personal to the national (and vice-versa).
  • By filling in the holes left in the national memory.
  • By translating words but also silence and void into visible spaces when the goal of the Final Solution was to leave no trace.

Korean Game - A Penn Museum Neatline Project

Korean Game - A Penn Museum Neatline Project

Student volunteers at the Penn Museum used Neatline to recreate a traditional Korean board game.

Captain Singleton's Travels - A Neatline Student Project

Captain Singleton's Travels - A Neatline Student Project

Explore the travels of Captain Singleton in this Neatline exhibit created as part of a student research project.

Anatolian Travelers - A Neatline Course Project

Anatolian Travelers - A Neatline Course Project

The Anatolian Travelers Project aims to map pre-20th century CE travel accounts about western Anatolia (modern Turkey).  We hope to better understand human movement through this landscape prior to the advent of modern transportation technologies.

This site was built as part of a Penn Classics course. Students used NeatlineNeatline Text, and Simile Timeline to embed the text of travel narratives on interactive maps and timelines.

American Literary Radicals - A Course Project

American Literary Radicals - A Neatline Course Project

Many types of literature appeared radical in the 19th century in the United States:  some texts were politically extreme, some stylistically innovative and others violated literary standards of taste.  Many texts did all three.  This project investigates the connection between innovations in style and content as well as messages that demanded social change.

Archive for Ornamental Bodies - A Neatline Course Project

Archive for Ornamental Bodies - A Neatline Course Project

The Archive for Ornamental Bodies is an experiment in the documentation and description of bodies — natural bodies, human bodies, metaphysical bodies, linguistic bodies. The AOB collects bodies of all materials and forms. It is our particular mission, however, to gather bodies characterized by some extravagance or inessentiality, and to confer plentitude on their excess through the medium of language.

This exhibit was curated by the students of a Penn English Department Course.

Centennial Exhibition - A Neatline Library Project

Centennial Exhibition - A Neatline Library Project

This project grew out of an inventory of the Centennial collection in the Perkins Rare Book Room at the Fisher Fine Arts library.  and What We Saw and How We Saw It, the book selected for the basis of this project. The text is a tour guide written for visitors to Memorial Hall, the art gallery of the Centennial. The way the text is written, visitors are guided from gallery to gallery, and are told about the different paintings and artists on exhibit. By recreating the gallery space virtually, we can move through Memorial Hall as visitors in 1876 would have done, experiencing the space and the paintings in the same context. Due to time contraints, only the American section has been covered. But, it is hoped that this project will be continued, so that the full gallery tour will be available.

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