THATCampVA will open on Friday, April 20, with your choice of two workshops.  The first of them, on a soon-to-be-launched tool for the spatial humanities, comes from instructor David McClure (co-teaching with Eric Rochester):

Neatline is a geo-temporal mapping application built on top of the Omeka framework that makes it possible to plot any collection of things – objects, letters, buildings, photographs, events, people, imaginative topologies – on maps and timelines. Built by the Scholars’ Lab in collaboration with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, Neatline provides a native environment in which to represent arguments, narratives, and stories that are fundamentally rooted in space and place.

The 2-hour workshop will start with a basic overview of the software – what it is, where it came from, the types of use-cases it’s designed to accommodate – and then move into the nitty-gritty of creating exhibits, configuring custom layouts, and plotting records on the map and timeline. The workshop will also touch on some more specialized techniques that make it possible to represent hierarchical relationships among records, create custom styles for map vectors and timeline spans, and edit the ordering of the content in an exhibit to create narratives and linear progressions.

If you have a laptop, you’ll be able to follow along in real-time using a public webservice soon to be launched at neatline.org.

Stay tuned for a bit more illumination on the DIY Aerial Photography workshop next week.