On the Accordance blog, David Lang kindly took notice of my recent post on my transition from my personally-drawn maps to maps generated using Accordance. In that post, David briefly compared the utility of Accordance user layers to my own strategy of adding layers in Photoshop. I thought I’d take a moment to comment briefly on my choice.

First, I simply know Photoshop better than I know the Accordance map tools, and since classes begin on Monday, I took the path of least learning curve.

Second, I find my Photoshop layers more aesthetically pleasing than the Accordance user layers. Seriously, try reproducing my Babylonian Empire map using Accordance user layers. Specifically, I could not find a way to easily add the triangular callout pointers to rectangle shapes on the Accordance user layer. I think one would have to use the Accordance curve tool to create boxes like this, but I have not found any way to constrain the curve tool to produce perfectly horizontal or vertical lines. In Photoshop, I can put a bunch of text layers (like the names of waterways) into a layer group and change the opacity, all at once, to 50%, so that they’re still visible but not too intrusive. I don’t think the Accordance drawing layer offers the capability of changing text opacity or rotating text—if those features exist, I haven’t yet learned how to access them. Now please understand that I’m not trying to criticize Accordance for any of this. Accordance is probably my single favorite piece of software, one that I use absolutely every day. My workflow patterns would change dramatically, for the worse, without Accordance. But for these particular tasks, Photoshop gave me tools that did exactly what I wanted, and I already knew how to use them.

Third, these particular maps must be accessible to my students via the web (Blackboard), so live display from Accordance would not do the job. When I display a map in class, I usually just want to help the students visualize the geography again. They should already know the callout details from the assigned readings, and I don’t want to re-lecture what they should have learned from the readings. (Right, Tim?) Having said that, I hasten to add that the animated routes in the Accordance maps and the slideshow mode seem to offer some exciting possibilities that I intend to explore later—perhaps for this spring semester, but more likely over the summer when I have a little more leisure time to calmly learn how all of the functions work.

In short, I very much appreciate Accordance user layers and many of the atlas’s other features, and I know that at present I’m under-using them. Indeed, that sense of under-using Accordance spurred the transition from my homemade maps to Accordance maps in the first place. However, I rarely consider any individual application to be “one-stop shopping.” I mean, that’s so Microsoft. In my Apple world, I use suites of software, and in this case I found that adding my annotations in Photoshop satisfied my immediate needs.