Marc's Experience with Neatline

    When class first began and I saw what neatline was, I was intimidated. The system looked abstract and looked like it required a lot of work to use. After some practice however on the system, I feel somewhat confident in my ability to use the system for future assignments or projects.

    At first when I glanced on the system, I had no idea what to do. All I saw was a map of the world, and options on the side that made no sense to me. After watching the video lectures though, I was slowly able to piece together what'd be my first ever neatline.

    For my first neatline exercise, I wanted to test it out on an easy topic - the neighborhood I grew up in. For the first of the three exercises, I had to set map restrictions on how far users could go through my exhibit. I grew up in a neighborhood within the city of San Jose, so I made the map restricted to the general vicinity of the city.

    For my second neatline exercise, I continued off my first project in my neighborhood, and decided to choose some points of interest to add to the map. These points of interest would be places I commonly visited in my time here in San Jose: my high school, middle school, and place I still currently work at.

    For my final neatline exercise, I decided to further detail my points of interest by adding pictures to the exhibit to show people what I saw visiting these areas. This part was the hardest for me as I couldn't get the format well for a little bit of time. More often than not, the pictures would cover up to description to the points of interest. I found a way to bypass this after some time, by clicking return and putting the picture in a paragraph under the text so it wouldn't overcrowd the description paragraph.

    After completing these exercises, I feel I have a decent understanding of the system and plan to use it on further research excursions. I love the idea of being able to visualize the areas of interest I've read so much about in texts.