Tag: Tropy

Using Tropy for the Classroom

It’s no secret that I’m a Tropy enthusiast. I often say that I would use and recommend Tropy even if I weren’t the principal investigator on the project. But this semester my work is divided between Tropy and teaching, on both the undergraduate and graduate level. And it turns out that pairing these things has enhanced both sides.

In both of my classes, my students use Tropy to collect primary sources for their projects, but I’m using Tropy in a slightly different way.

Keeping Track of Course Visuals

I’ve created a Tropy project for each of my courses this semester. In these projects, I keep track of all the images I use in my courses. For my undergrads, that’s predominantly visual aids that I use in my PowerPoints. Putting the images into Tropy has two salutary effects on my course organization: (1) It encourages me to put my images into a logical folder when I download them from the Internet (rather than leaving them in my Downloads, which I’m wont to do). And (2) it encourages me to record relevant metadata about them so that I can be very accurate about what my images are and where they came from.

A screenshot of the Tropy project for my undergraduate class, showing the lists I use for organization.

I can keep all of my images in a unified folder in my file system, since I can use Tropy to categorize them into topics and even specific lectures. Using the “Show photo in folder” function, it’s easy for me to get back to the original file so I can put it into my PowerPoint.

Furthermore, I can record in the notes for each item how I used the images in class, or what I should do differently next time.

I’ve found this use for Tropy incredibly helpful as I’ve created new PowerPoints this semester but wanted to use visual materials I’d collected when I taught this class last semester. A little extra organization goes a long way for those last-minute PowerPoint needs.

Creating Primary Source Readers

For my graduate class, I use fewer visuals in PowerPoint, so my Tropy project isn’t full of that kind of material. Instead, it includes primary sources that we work with in class. When I teach with or about primary sources (which is often!), I place an emphasis on recording metadata as an ethical practice. So when we look at primary sources in class, I like to include the metadata for the items we’re looking at.

Ironically, in a digital history class, I sometimes find it more helpful to use pen and paper to think about digital history topics. But that doesn’t eliminate the need for metadata. Enter Tropy’s Print function.

Using the Print function, I can generate pages that include both the image of the source we’re talking about, and the metadata that tells the students what it is and where it came from. We can then look at a printed copy of the digital item and mark it up with colored pens and Post-it Notes. But all the time, the students know exactly what their source is and where it came from, because the information is right there on the page (and it’s nicely formatted).

An item from my Tropy project, printed with all its metadata.

I can also use the CSV export function to pull metadata out of a large Tropy project, which we can then use to think about the primary sources in aggregate. (We haven’t done this yet in class, but we’re going to in a few weeks.)

What’s Next

One of the common critiques of digital tool creation and use is that people start with the tool rather than the problem they need to solve. Being tool-focused leads to tunnel vision, lack of intellectual creativity, the list goes on. But in this case, the problems I needed to solve existed well before Tropy. It just happened that Tropy was able to provide the solution to my problems because some parts of it have outstripped the original charter for its creation. The product is the better for it, and it’s also more flexible in its uses.

Tropy has always been great for organizing photos from archival research trips—that’s what it is for, after all. But many of the features that are continually being added to Tropy make it even more valuable for other uses as well. I’m delighted that one of those uses is making this teacher’s life a little bit easier. New features that are coming down the pike will make it even better.

In Defense of Finding Things in Archives

Over the past several months, and probably before that, several historians have been flayed on social media for making claims like “I found this forgotten thing in the archive,” and stories about their finds criticized for calling their work “discovery.” Scholars have (rightly) called out these stories as erasing the work of the archivists in those archives. But these excoriations are often accompanied by calls for all researchers to stop saying they’ve discovered things in archives. I disagree.

I work at the intersection of historians and archivists. I manage the development of software whose goal is, in part, to help researchers see and acknowledge the work done for them by archivists. I encourage researchers in every training session to increase their awareness of and gratitude for the work of those who made it possible to find the sources they’re photographing. However, another goal of Tropy is to allow researchers to add item-level metadata to the sources they photograph, a level of granularity not often achieved by archivists. Every archive would love to have item-level metadata on their collections, I’m sure, but most have neither the financial nor personnel resources to make it happen.

Hence it is entirely possible for a researcher to find, within a described collection, a “lost” source. A lost source is not necessarily one that no one has ever known existed, or that has not been placed into a location that is “organized.” It is a source that no one currently knows the location of, or possibly the existence of. When I have lost my keys in my house, I don’t mean that I have never known where they are–I just don’t know where they are right now.

Likewise, anything in an archive has of course been known to someone at some point. Someone had to accession it; someone might have even written a finding aid that included it. But that work may have been done decades ago, by archivists who took their personal knowledge of those collections with them when they retired. A researcher can certainly find a source that no current archivist knows about, even if they know the collection exists. Because finding aids almost never include item-level information, a source can be cataloged perfectly and still be completely invisible to archivists.

For example, I was recently in the Library of Congress looking at the papers of Richard Dale. In Box 1, I found, alongside the commissions and appointments that the finding aid said would be there, Richard Dale’s certificate of entrance into the Society of the Cincinnati, signed by George Washington himself. A passing librarian stopped to admire the certificate, and he was surprised to find a document with Washington’s signature on it so easily accessible. (I was too–the last time I looked at documents that included presidential signatures, the archivists had to retrieve them from the vault.) For all intents and purposes, I discovered that certificate. I daresay not one person currently at the Library of Congress knew that document was there.

Richard Dale’s certificate of entrance into the Society of the Cincinnati, October 31, 1785. Library of Congress, Papers of Richard Dale: Commissions and Appointments.

Furthermore, finding aids are an imperfect mechanism. Things get put in the wrong place. On a research trip to the National Archives once, I found in a box labeled “Charts of the Mediterranean” several schematic diagrams of the torpedo damage to a vessel called Terpsichore. There was no identifying information on those schematics, and they couldn’t be related to the charts of the Mediterranean (torpedos weren’t a thing till years after the dates on the charts). I still don’t know the significance of the Terpsichore, but my experience is a perfect example of “stumbling across” something that no archivist could have been able to point me to unless they had personally accessioned it.

Schematic of torpedo damage to the Terpsichore. National Archives, Charts of the Mediterranean.

Again, I am not saying that researchers should unadvisedly claim they’ve found something lost–I too get annoyed when people overstate their discoveries. A fully described item in an online catalog cannot be described as lost. Something an archivist showed a researcher in person is not lost. Those instances are not discoveries of those sources, though perhaps they are fresh realizations of the source’s significance. But we need to stop reflexively saying that researchers can’t make discoveries. Just because we know where the Titanic sank doesn’t mean that discovering its wreck is any less of an accomplishment. Give archivists credit for doing their job; but give researchers credit for doing theirs too.