About
 

Fortepan US is a networked cooperative portal that supports the preservation, sharing, viewing, and use of family and local historical photographs.

This “digital first” platform inspires cultural heritage institutions to rethink digital archiving practices by making local historical documents more accessible.

Our inspiration (and name) comes from the Fortepan project based in Budapest. Fortepan was established in 2010 and has since become a cultural institution throughout Hungary. The Hungarian team chose the name “Fortepan” to pay homage to the popular black-and-white negative Fortepan film sold throughout the world after World War II, which was produced by the Hungarian company FORTE (1948-2001).

Today, Fortepan is more of a concept for sharing and displaying photos for public use.

Drawing upon the power of place, the Fortepan US platform encourages family contributors and cultural heritage institutions within a single U.S. state or other entity (like an Indigenous territory or U.S. national park) to join digital forces and virtually unite the historical photographs/cultural artifacts in their holdings through a single interface.

These place-based photos are also organized according to time: thousands of photos from the same state or territory, across multiple collections, are situated along a timeline so that all historical photographs are immediately contextualized alongside other photos from the same year. This gives users the feel of a collective family album that tells the visual story of that place. You can view the photos in chronological order in either timeline view or grid view.

Finally, Fortepan US is a powerful tool for grouping photographs by theme. We have a list of controlled category terms (like “children” and “farms”) that administrators apply to each photo in the archive to increase its findability by subject. Descriptive tags offer an even more detailed layer of thematic grouping, offering users a convenient entry point to photographs that resonate with their interests and experiences. The Fortepan US platform is built to encourage crowd-sourced tagging so everyone can share their expertise in describing a photograph’s content.

The Fortepan US cooperative portal increases accessibility, offers joyful exploration with more publicly useful and immersive experiences, and inspires ardent participation in the tagging and interpretation of the images shared publicly online. This creates a fundamentally different viewing experience than clicking around in segmented collections–more delightful, more diverse, more holistic, more grounded in the social history of the people. Any version of Fortepan US, including interpretive exhibits (explained below), can be embedded into any other website. Embedding enables more sharing--the photographs along with the interactive viewing experience.

Finally, we recognize the broad range of images that we have curated into this archive, including images that may be offensive or portray negative stereotypes. All images should be viewed in the context of their time periods. Fortepan US does not endorse the views represented in such images. However, we think these images are important for the overall conversation about who we are as Americans. They provide a fuller understanding and representation of different time periods in United States history. We hope you agree why they are there. 

Our code

Fortepan US makes images available to the public using Kronofoto, the project’s open source code, which is available for download on Github and can be used for all sorts of different collection types..

Kronofoto is built primarily with python, html and some javascript. The libraries are django, htmx, and alpine, with additional libraries used for certain features like leaflet, photo sphere viewer. All technology supporting the Fortepan US cooperative portal has been built exclusively with open source software, including the Linux operating system, Apache web server, PostgreSQL database server, Python programming language, and other open software and code, and it is mostly database agnostic but will run best on postgresql. A vibrant collaborative dynamic has been fostered between the developer and operations teams, creating an ideal environment for new ideas.

Tools

Fortepan US is also dedicated to helping people interpret the public online photographs and build upon public memory to tell stories. Interpretation tools include:

  • FotoAlbum allows researchers and creators to create customized lists of photos according to their own interests and needs. FotoAlbums  are viewable in grid or timeline view, and can be saved for future reference, shared with others, and even embedded into a website.

  • FotoStory empowers users to curate a digital exhibit or story. Users will be able to draw upon any image from the Kronofoto portal and insert it into a variety of text + image template options, which create a dynamic vertical exhibit with parallax scrolling. Users will also be able to embed their final exhibits into another website.

  • FotoSphere is an immersive visual geolocation tool that exactly and beautifully situates historic photographs in the modern landscape with an immersive degree of visual precision.

  • FotoSphere Tour is a  360º augmented reality walking tour based on interlinked FotoSphere images.

The platform also supports Traditional Knowledge labels through a partnership with Local Contexts.

We are making Fortepan US a national reality, building the platform so it can structurally accommodate any state, Indigenous territory, or national park, and exist on multiple servers for maximum platform sharing and administrative autonomy.

Support

Fortepan US is supported by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission,National Endowment for Humanities, Humanities Iowa, CT Humanities, and the University of Northern Iowa, and other private funds.