#neatline

by Joshua Allen Holm URL: http://opensource.com/education/15/4/open-source-digital-humanities

Welcome to the second installment of a monthly feature in which I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I will take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities research as well as at humanities research projects…

I was looking up scholarly digital projects the other day for my class when I stumbled upon this nifty one. I haven't used it yet, but it seems like a great program for history and geography presentations. The website is called Neatline and they use the Omeka software, which is downloadable directly from the website.

Neatline is an personal online historical map builder that allows the user to connect their maps to timelines, visuals or auditory descriptions. The goal is to allow the user to create their own project whether it consists of differing landscapes in ancient European towns, plotting the Atlantic slave trade or following satellite launches. Through a variety of plug-ins, Neatline can create a digital and interactive map that includes clickable records, timelines, text all within the same page or site. Think of it as Powerpoint slides getting a Prezi makeover, but through the medium of maps. The website is very user friendly for the aspiring scholar. 

I can't wait to use this someday! It's the perfect program for a map enthusiast like me.

"[Neatline] opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation." - http://neatline.org/ 

Demonstrate original mapping processes

Route a personal journey

Or track satellites 

Highlighting Neatline

Over the summer Our Marathon interns utilized Neatline to construct interactive exhibits from the unique content of the archive. 

Do you have ideas for other exhibits? What do you like or dislike about Our City and One Boston?

Have you designed an exhibit regarding the Marathon bombings? 

We Love You Boston <3

The Our City: Boston and the Boston Red Sox exhibit emphasizes the important role sports played in the city's recovery from the Marathon bombings. Pictured here is a digital copy of a poster left at the Copley Square Memorial.

Sports represent the pulse of our country, of our cities. During World War II, President Roosevelt did not suspend baseball in order to keep up the morale of soldiers. While many grew concerned the sport wasted troops strength, service members like Private Clifford P Mansfield at Fort Knox, Kentucky wrote, "For the morale of the soldier and the morale of America itself, 'keep 'em playing'." In 1980, the United States “Miracle” hockey team beat the 6-time champion Soviet Union team. Then as now, many Americans believed that moment represented a turning point in the Cold War. Similarly, in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the city of New Orleans, the New Orleans Saints went on to a franchise record season and a Super Bowl victory in 2009, reinvigorating a still recovering community.

Our Marathon launched the "One Boston" Neatline exhibit last week. To give some more insight into the process, Nate Rehm-Daly wrote a brief post on his experience. Nate is an undergraduate student at Haverford College pursuing degrees in fine arts and classical studies. He is working on Our Marathon this summer via a Tri-Co DH Summer Internship.

The 'One Boston' Neatline exhibit is an attempt to examine some of the messages left by sympathizers in the aftermath of the bombing. Using Neatline, I mapped one of the posters left in Copley Square, looking for trends among the messages. Neatline allows the curator to create an interactive exhibit from an image. One of Neatline's primary features is the ability to create polygons which overlay specific parts of the image. When clicked on, the polygons bring up a popover, which can be used to deliver content to the viewer. For this project, I grouped similar messages together using polygons of the same color; hovering over one message in a given category makes all the polygons for similar messages appear, highlighting the scope of the category as a whole. Some of these categories include: references to 'Boston Strong', international messages, messages from U.S. communities, biblical quotes, and others. The on click popover I mentioned gives some information about the category and also provides links to related content within the Our Marathon archive. In this sense, the Neatline exhibit serves as a portal to additional content.

This week I decided to do some making, rather than writing, and got myself set up with Omeka and Neatline, thanks to Academic AMIs and Amazon Web Services. Spoiler alert: I won't be showing those off just yet.

The various steps involved reminded me of how far the web has come—something-teen years ago, when I wanted to put up my own website in college, I had to code in the HTML myself, gradually forgot how to do such things over the ensuing decade, and nowadays the need to know that kind of knowledge is something the casual Internet user barely needs. In other words, I experienced some moments of frustration when I found myself opening an FTP client for the first time since the Clinton administration, but it was also interesting to do some nuts and bolts coding which, really, would probably be child’s play for the average IT consultant.

I did all of this because I’ve thought for a long time that the Panic of 1907 lends itself to being presented as an event that unfolded in space and time and wanted to experiment with how this could be done. For today you can take a look at a Google Map I created that basically throws down some markers for notable sites of the panic—the office of investment banker J.P. Morgan, the locations of some of the important banks and trust companies that were besieged by depositors, and homes of some notable individuals.

Plotting locations on a map, for example, shows that the panic was not only something Morgan was confronting at his office during the day but also in his own neighborhood; we can see that the Knickerbocker Trust Company, which shut its doors on October 22nd after a bank run, was barely three blocks away from his home.

But you quickly run up against Google Maps’ limits. For example, Herbert Satterlee, J.P. Morgan’s son-in-law and biographer, tells an anecdote of spending the night of October 23rd distracting James R. Keene, a notorious stock-market speculator, from meeting with Morgan and possibly learning in advance what his strategy for managing the panic would be. Satterlee even describes the route they took:

“Mr. Keene was living at the Waldorf-Astoria, [and] I picked him up after dinner when he crossed Fifth Avenue… He and I talked about Newport and social matters, and so managed that we walked through Thirty-Fifth Street to Park Avenue, then up to Thirty-Sixth… We reached No. 37 [the Satterlee house] without attracting the attention of the reporters and curiosity seekers… [and] from half past eight until after eleven we talked about Mr. Keene’s boyhood,” until Satterlee got a signal that Morgan had gone to bed and Keene made his farewells without having met Morgan, “expressing himself as having had a very pleasant evening.”1

As you can see if you scroll around the Google Map, I added a path retracing the walk Satterlee describes. I also added markers denoting two events—first, Morgan asking Satterlee to “keep him away” at dinner, before the walk, and then another to mark the three hours Satterlee spent talking with Keene. But that’s just about all I can do in Google Maps, which was not built for doing the kinds of things that historians might want to do with maps.

The great thing about Neatline is that I can draw that same path and add on photographs (a.k.a. illustrate it with items from Omeka) of Satterlee and Keene. But I can also change the underlying map so that it displays a historic map showing the actual street grid at the time (especially useful in downtown Manhattan). Finally, I can create a timeline so that a person who wants to step through the events of the panic, day by day, won’t see that walk show up until October 23rd at around 8 p.m.

At least, eventually I think I’ll be able to do all of those things. For now, here's a brief snapshot of my rudimentary attempt to capture that same walk (the skinny green line) in Neatline.

There are other advantages to conceptualizations like those Neatline can offer. Most accounts of the panic lean heavily on three sources: Satterlee’s biography, a memorandum of the event written by Morgan’s partner, George W. Perkins, and a reminiscence of the panic written by Federal Reserve banker Benjamin Strong for a biography of Henry P. Davison, another Morgan partner. The history of the panic, in other words, has been very much influenced by accounts written from the Morgan firm’s point of view.

Yet there are other sources, written from the point of view of other bankers in memoirs and “authorized biographies,” told in testimony to Congressional committees and antitrust trials, or located in government records and private correspondence, that offer different perspectives. Thomas P. Kane, describes the panic in his book The Romance and Tragedy of Banking (which I wrote about last week) from his perspective as an official in Washington, worrying about the solvency of the institutions he regulated. Oakleigh Thorne, president of the Trust Company of America, another institution hit hard by depositor runs, bitterly argued that his bank was attacked because Perkins singled it out to newspaper reporters. (His descendants landed on their feet.)

The Panic of 1907, and J.P. Morgan’s role in responding to it, have been examined by many scholars as a template for actions undertaken during the 2008 financial crisis, yet there are considerable gaps in the story as it’s currently told. The complex storylines that Neatline enables its users to present (see some demos here) allows us the ability to walk through the panic as both its “winners” and “losers” experienced it, then, we might gain a different perspective on financial crises both past, present, and future.

Gee, that was still a lot of writing.

Use this interactive map to navigate the presence of Codeine from Siegfried Ltd. within the Delaware River. There are two ways to navigate the map: 1. follow the waypoints (the table of contents styled box on the right) or 2. explore on your own!