Gardens of Branching Paths: Discovering Possible Worlds of Research at the Library of Congress

This post was written by Ralph Pantozzi, a 2024-2025 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress.

Like the reader of a Choose Your Own Adventure book from the 1970s and 80s, you have made a sequence of choices and arrived on this page. I’m glad you are here. During my time as an Einstein Fellow, I have traveled multiple branching routes through time and space in Library’s collections. More importantly, so can you!

Unlike many a choice-based novel (such as the first known book of the form) all of your outcomes here at the Library of Congress can be happy adventures of learning and discovery. As an example, I’d like to lead you through one journey of exploration. To begin, consider the image below.

What do you notice? What you wonder? What conclusions can you support?

Are you thinking about skyscrapers? New York City in the 1930’s? Trade and commerce in the Depression era? The blog post in which this aerial view of New York City was featured might lead you to choose further adventures involving baseball, World War I, the Wright Brothers, or satellite mapping. Your next step is up to you. At the Library, you can always ask for help, of course.

Now, back to that image at the start of the post. What do you think it is? (Don’t worry, you’ll find out shortly.) First, what do you notice? What questions do you have? What does it remind you of?  Upon finding it, I immediately thought about branching structures in nature, art, and mathematics.

Before I reveal the details, take another look at the railyards of my birthplace, Jersey City, New Jersey, visible on the left side of the aerial view. You may wonder why there are so many railroad tracks at the shoreline. You can learn more about the history of, and technology used in, these railyards in the image below (from this set). The images here, here and here are more tickets to ride your own trains of thought and research from these railyards.

For decades, goods and people moved in both directions along the New Jersey and New York rails to and from a variety of destinations. The image at the start of the post, a 1855 organizational diagram of the New York and Erie Railroad (from this item) is a unique representation of the many people involved in railroad operations.

An organizational chart that puts the board of directors at the bottom might be considered an unusual choice. I invite you to explore the information within by examining the high resolution copies of image 8 and image 9. What do you notice? Were you surprised to learn what the purpose of this chart was? Does its structure remind you of any other images you’ve seen? What do you wonder? Where might your discoveries take you?

Bon Voyage!