Week 3: My Unsure Yet Interested Thoughts of Neatline

    Using Neatline was a bit of a mixed experience for me. I actually quite like the idea of it, how you can use points on a map to give information while also giving readers a sense of where and when. As Michelle mentioned during that class, it is quite situational. Not all assignments are very rooted in geography, or even have more than one location, or at least have largely differing locations to where Neatline would seem useful. In that case, the information can be conveyed far better in different formats. Another problem I had with it was with the website itself. It is dated in terms of design, to the point where for some reason, you are able to edit anybody else’s project, and even worse, you cannot find your own projects automatically. You have to manually search through the list and hope you can find it by sorting by date. That part is quite unintuitive, and there’s also the fact that you can’t search for locations on the map. But once you are making points, it was pretty enjoyable finding specific locations and giving it information and dates. But as it stands right now, I don’t see myself using Neatline for the research excursions just yet. That part could always change depending on the assignment, however. For future projects, I am worried that the information wouldn’t be as in depth as it could be due to it being presented on only a few points. I am excited to map out locations of the books we read, as it grounds fiction in an interesting way that makes you connect with the book better.

Comments

  1. CassiOctober 9, 2022 at 9:14 AM

    Hi Andrew! I agree with a lot of what you said. The actual website layout and functions were difficult for me as well. I am not a very geographically minded person, so I agree that using it to map out locations in different stories will be helpful. Hopefully it will get easier to use as the year goes on!

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  2. Noah English 11H BlogOctober 9, 2022 at 4:50 PM

    I agree that a lot of the Neatline features are unintuitive or strangely named. This makes me wary of completing a project on Neatline. I think once I understand it it will be easy to use, however, there are a lot of niche features—so the learning curve will be difficult.

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  3. Griffin JonesOctober 9, 2022 at 11:12 PM

    I totally agree with your thoughts on Neatline. It has a lot of potential, and maybe I just haven't used it enough to understand some of the design choice that Neatline made, but right now it feels a little clunky and I think I could present my research in better more efficient formats.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Eloise DanielloOctober 9, 2022 at 11:58 PM

    Hey Andrew! I totally agree with everything you said in this post. It seems like old software that definitely needs an update. I also think there must be another website that allows users to do the same thing but in a more modern way. I think with a little more exposure to everything you can do with it, it could be better, but right now I don't love it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. John SawyerOctober 10, 2022 at 4:12 PM

    I did not even notice that you can edit anyone's project. It is quite dated indeed. As far as our class functions there should not be much of a problem security-wise though. It does not seem like anyone in our class would mess with another's assignment either but that is still very funny to have found out.

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