The Tropy webinar for graduate students is coming up this Friday, October 9 at 11:00am EDT. We’ve had a lot of grad student interest in this session, and registration is now full. Here are some links to resources that will be discussed during the session:
Hey, graduate students! We’re guessing this whole covid business isn’t what you thought you were getting when you started grad school. You probably saw yourself as spending hours, days, or weeks looking at sources from which you can create incisive analysis, or traveling to farflung locations to do research. But now you may be feeling apprehensive or discouraged about doing archival research in the age of covid. You also might be thinking that keeping yourself on track amidst everything else that’s going on feels impossible.
We held our first Tropy webinar on June 16, 2020, and it was a success! If you couldn’t make it, that’s ok. We have made a recording available of the unedited session on YouTube.
You’ve been asking for a long time for the Tropy team to provide online instruction about our software, which helps you organize and describe your photos. Recent events may have made your need for an organizational system more pressing.
All over the world, archives and libraries are shutting their doors as covid-19 spreads. These closures mean that researchers can’t use the not-yet-digitized collections that exist in those places. Or does it?
It’s that time again — time for another round of Train the Trainers! This fall we’re going to Atlanta and Texas, and in the spring we’ll be heading to Illinois and the Midwest. These session are free, but registration is required.
Today we released Tropy 1.4.3. Its primary new features are some new ways to add metadata in more places.
Train the Trainers is coming to Washington, DC (or really, to Fairfax, VA)! We’ll be convening on our home turf, George Mason University, to do two sessions, one for librarians/archivists, and one for faculty, as outlined here.
I love teaching Tropy workshops. It is a delight to see the glimmer of hope and excitement in people’s eyes as they realize their research photos don’t have to be a gigantic stressful mess. But I can’t be everywhere, and I can’t teach everyone.
The Tropy team is pleased to announce the first of our Train the Trainers workshops, to be held at Northeastern University on November 13.
We’re delighted to announce the funding of a second phase of development for Tropy, the free and open-source software that helps humanities researchers use digital images gathered from archives. With the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tropy will enable cloud storage and remote access of research images, metadata, and archival templates over the next two years. Tropy will also significantly expand the range of media it imports and expose that media and metadata to computational analysis. To introduce and demonstrate Tropy and its new features to a variety of audiences, our team will offer training workshops at regional centers of higher education in the United States and abroad.
We are happy to announce the release of Tropy 1.2. This release includes several new features that make it easier to work with custom metadata templates.
As I outlined in my last post, my primary Tropy project is mostly composed of handwritten correspondence. I also have side projects that include different types of sources. And I’ve also been getting my sources in a different way.
[This post features a guest author, David McKenzie. David is a graduate student at George Mason University as well as the associate director of education for digital resources at Ford’s Theatre.]
We are delighted to announce the release of Tropy 1.1!
As a historian who works on the U.S. Navy in the early republican era, I have found that many, if not most, of my sources have been published in some form. Many have been published both in print and online. So when I go to an archive to look at manuscripts, there’s a strong chance that the documents I look at have already been published. Thus, it might seem like photographing manuscripts, particularly in big federal archives like the Library of Congress or the National Archives, is a waste of my time.
We are pleased to announce that the 1.0 release of Tropy is now available. While our crack team of developers continues to refine the software and add new features, Tropy is now officially out of its beta testing phase. If you haven’t yet tried Tropy, now is the perfect time to try this new tool for working with your archival research photos.
Since Zotero’s earliest days, our users have clamored for better support of historical manuscripts and, later, images. Zotero after all was developed by the Center for History and New Media, and as historians began to conduct their archival research with digital cameras instead of pencils, why shouldn’t Zotero help them? And years later when we sketched out and then launched development of Tropy, why did we choose to develop it as a separate application rather than add its functionality to Zotero?
A new beta version of Tropy is now available. From this point on, your projects should migrate as Tropy is updated through the 1.0 release. We do recommend that you make backups of your project files, as this is still beta software and some irregularities may remain.
Today we’re releasing the first beta version of Tropy, free and open-source software that helps you organize and describe your research photographs.
Tropy is designed to help researchers organize and describe the photos they take in archives. It is intended to be one piece of a researcher’s workflow that starts with locating and viewing archival material in the archives. Because Tropy is dependent on archival material, we partnered with several archives and libraries to gain their feedback about the research process from their perspective. We also enlisted their help in doing some user testing for us, both on the concept and on the beta version of Tropy.
A poster about Tropy, developed by Stephen Robertson and Abby Mullen, drawing on Johannes Krtek’s design work, was presented January 7, in a poster session at the American Historical Association Conference in Denver. As part of our efforts to raise awareness of the project among historians, the poster highlighted where Tropy fits in the research practices and workflow of scholars gathering material in archives.
Negotiating archives is one of the major joys and frustrations of any researcher. Even when researchers find something in the archives that exactly fits their needs, remembering what those sources said afterwards can be a challenge. Researchers have traditionally used methods such as extensive note-taking, photocopying, and requesting scans of sources to remember what they’ve read in the archives. Over the last several years, though, research practices regarding archival materials have begun to change.