For this blog post, I’d like to follow Alison’s suggestion to think about how the creation and structuring of data relates to our final projects for this course, drawing on themes from our readings, our class discussion, and my work with Tropy for my final project.

An advantage, as I see it, of Tropy is that it allows researchers to organize their images of archival material and to pair images of archival material with metadata that describes the identifying features of the document. This organizing of images and the pairing of images and metadata has been useful for my research, as my current method of storing images of archival material—simply using folders in File Explorer for large groups of images—has made accessing these images and information about the archival material they represent a labor-intensive task. Because I think it would be unwieldy, if not impossible, to add all of the metadata for a document as the image file’s name, I’ve kept this descriptive information as handwritten notes in a research notebook, with the result that my image files are organized in the order in which I took the photographs, and this in turn reflects the order of the documents in individual box folders in the archive. I suppose that I could create File Explorer folders to correspond to archival box folders, but the idea of separating my images in this way and making it even more difficult to navigate from one document in one folder to another in another folder hasn’t appealed to me.

While it has been satisfying to pair my images with documents’ metadata using Tropy, it has involved working with Tropy’s existing templates for structuring item-level metadata. One of Tropy’s three templates is Tropy Correspondence, which includes fields for the document’s recipient as well as its author. In the number of items I have added to Tropy, nine of them are letters that were either composed and typed or typed from notes or dictation by a secretary. Should the secretary be considered the author of these letters? Would the secretary’s potential authorship depend on whether they themselves composed the letter or whether they typed the letter from notes left or dictation given? What of this information could be determined by a researcher removed from the circumstances in which an archival document was created? My approach to these letters has been to indicate that the letter was sent by the secretary in the item’s title, but to note the secretary’s employer as the author of the letter so that I can use the author field to sort items.

I’ve also been thinking about the question that John Markoff posed in relation to the cahiers project of how well an existing corpus of material in an archive or archives reflects or represents the total amount of material written historically. In some instances, the loss of material may be evident—for example, a letter may refer to a telegram received by the letter’s author, but that telegram may not be preserved alongside the letter in an archive. In other instances, researchers may have to work toward identifying documents that have not been preserved and make assumptions based on the information available in surviving documents. While this may prove frustrating for researchers, noting instances of absence and loss may prompt critical reflection on archives as constructed repositories of information and as resources for historical research.