Research project TROPY 3

Computational Access and Cloud Storage for Archival Research Photographs: Exanded Outreach, Large Scale Projects, and Third-Party Integrations (TROPY 3)

Tailor-made for archival research, Tropy is a free and open-source tool designed and produced by an international team of historians and software developers.

The project at a glance

  • Start date:
    01 Jan 2023
  • Duration in months:
    36
  • Funding:
    The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) / Digital Scholar
  • Principal Investigator(s):
    Sean Takats

About

Originally created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), Tropy today is jointly developed by RRCHNM, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), and Digital Scholar, the nonprofit corporation which operates allied projects Zotero, Omeka, and Sourcery. Since its beta launch in 2016, Tropy has become essential software used by thousands of humanities researchers around the world, a powerful tool for managing and exploring research photos. With Tropy, researchers can effectively manage thousands of digital images taken at archives and libraries. Once the research photos are imported to Tropy desktop application, users can combine them into items, attach descriptive metadata and notes to them. In a Tropy project, users work with a friendly editing interface that allows customized metadata templates to enhance artifacts contextualization. Tags and lists are also available to increase users control over a project according to their specific needs. Beyond organizing and describing research photos, Tropy helps researchers to search all their project information, notes and tags. Finally, the tool offers different possibilities to export research projects to other platforms. Tropy is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Tropy benefits from the support of its enthusiastic users, who supply essential feedback, feature requests, issue reports, workshops, and interface translations. All Tropy code is open source and freely available on GitHub.

Organisation and Partners

  • Department of Social Sciences
  • Digital History & Historiography
  • Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)

Project team

  • Sean Takats

  • Douglas Mcrae

  • Sylvester Keil

  • Johannes Krtek

Keywords

  • Computational Access
  • Cloud Storage for Archival Research Photographs