Using some of the photos deployed in my Omeka Project from last week, I’ve demonstrated some of the capabilities of the TROPY system. Tracking down and installing TROPY was simple enough and followed pretty much the same steps as Zotero.
Once the program was ready, I populated it with some of the images I had saved to complete my Omeka Project on Merovingian material culture. The visual comparison to Zotero is an obvious point to make here; the developers have used pretty much the same interface for both.
I then set about entering some metadata for the images. All but two of these photos were retrieved from the British Museum, so I completed these as a set. I discovered that TROPY was displeased when I attempted to copy and paste information into the metadata fields; this, sadly, meant typing out the specific copyright statements I’ve been using by hand.
Next I added in some tags to my photos. “Merovingian Material Culture” seemed a good pick for all of them. I also added some tags which divided the photos based on the type of item: household item, state product, clothing, and weapon. While overkill for the small number of photos I have, these tags would be useful for an expanded project on the subject if I had to deal with more images.
As a final aid for this theoretical expansion, I assigned all of the subcategories a color code to make the type of item easier to identify in passing. At this stage, I could easily go on to create a larger project on Merovingian material culture; with a couple modifications, I could also expand beyond the Merovingian world to include examples from other contemporary civilizations by adding further tags.
