Neatline is a project of the Scholars' Lab at the University of VIrginia Library, and has been funded through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Library of Congress. Software development is now feature-complete, and we'll launch the project in the Spring of 2012.

Neatline allows scholars to combine timelines, maps, and scholarly narratives to explore literary and historical materials in new and exciting ways. A suite of plugins for the Omeka framework, Neatline facilitates the creation of spatial and temporal views of cultural materials.

In other words, it's a tool for the creation of interlinked timelines and maps as interpretive expressions of the literary or historical content of archival collections. It promotes collaboration by libraries and cultural heritage institutions with scholarly end-users, who will build on standard metadata to produce rich, evocative – even theoretical and playful – geospatial and temporal visualizations of the textual content of catalogued letters, manuscripts, and artifacts.

Neatline is therefore a geo-temporal framework for fruitful interchange among scholars and the stewards of primary resources. We offer it as a contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular.