Hello Tropy (soon)

I’m happy to announce the funding of Tropy, a major new RRCHNM initiative that Stephen Robertson and I will lead over the next two years. Thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tropy will fill a crucial need in the initial phase of the research process: where humanities researchers organize and analyze their vast and rapidly growing personal collections of digital images collected in the archives. In the coming months we’ll be working closely with researchers and a range of archives to develop an entirely new digital tool that enables the efficient import, editing, organization, search, and sharing of images taken in the archives.

Although we’re just getting started, I’m already excited about Tropy for a whole host of reasons:

First, Tropy is something that researchers want, right now. Unlike Zotero, which required (and in some cases, still requires) some convincing to get humanities scholars to use it, people working in the archives are well aware that they’re drowning in the sea of digital images. And on the other side of the transaction, archives are struggling to meet the rapidly evolving demands of their users. No existing software meets these needs, since photo management applications like Apple Photos or Google Picasa are geared entirely toward the photograph, not to the artifact it depicts.

Second, although we remain a long way from a shipping piece of software, Tropy is already the product of over two years of planning and input from a wide range of experts. Stephen and I began discussing it way back in 2013. Like so many ideas at RRCHNM, the plan for Tropy took further shape thanks to the intellectual generosity of countless colleagues: Faolan Cheslack-Postava, Mandy Regan, Jim Safley, Lisa Rhody, Ken Albers, Kim Nguyen, and John Flatness, among others. And so even before development has begun in earnest, Tropy is already an intensively collaborative enterprise. And if you — a researcher, an archivist, a software developer — are interested in participating in this project, there will be ample opportunity in the very near future.

Third, Tropy will significantly extend an already critically important scholarly infrastructure developed at RRCHNM. Zotero remains best-suited for bibliographic data, notes, and citation; Omeka for the public presentation of research collections; PressForward for the collection and dissemination of scholarship. Tropy, in contrast, targets the discrete research tasks of collection, discovery, organization, and sharing of images.

Fourth, Tropy takes RRCHNM development in a novel technical direction. Without getting too much into the technology we’re putting into Tropy, it will very much be a “2016 and beyond” environment. Thanks to newly emerging platforms like Electron, we will actually be able to build a cross-platform tool that functions the way we want it to, something that simply would not have been cost-effective or even feasible given the environments we’re currently using for projects like Omeka (LAMP) or Zotero (XULRunner/PHP).

As the project takes shape we’ll be launching a dedicated project site and (of course) making the code freely available. More soon.

More coverage:
Stephen’s post
University press release
RRCHNM announcement