Sugar, Spice, and Archives!

This post is about my adventures with food, crowdsourcing, and a view back into the past through the New York Time “Whats on the Menu?” project.

The design of the website:

The aesthetic appeal of the website is pretty interesting. It certianly has the similar black & white theme that we have come to expect from the New York Times but it is combined with images of old recipes and meals from the New York Public Library and its collection of recipe books. This is what I was looking for in a corwd sourcing project, because it appealed to my interest in archives and the sense of a digital library of sorts that I could contribute too. That being said, the website is very glitchy and the search function has not worked properly for at least several months. This might be that the site has not updated its processing in several years either due to lack of funding or computational resources. While the project and the landing page seem palatable, its the navagation of the site where problems may arise.

The kind of projects offered:

Their are several tasks offered by this project. But interestingly, unlike “crowd sourcing” databases that offer different projects at different rates of completion this website was all about the same project and had different tasks that you could do that served the goal of transcribing the recipe archives. So my exploration abilities relied mostly on choosing a themed area to transcribe, a particular menu I was interested in, or a dish that may have seemed appealing.

The project goals for what you participated in:

The prime directive of the project is to transcribe the over 45,000 menus in the New York Public Libraries restaurant menu collection dish-by-dish. This is exciting because it partitions menus (from as early as the 19th century) into smaller parts making comparative culinary analysis over time, region, dish, or cuisine more managable and accessible to the public. The project has been funded by numerous sources including the NEH and is in the final stages of completing everything they have already digitized. The ultimate goal of the project is to trascribe the entire collection of menus housed at the library. They started in 2011 with over 9000 menus photgraphed for an exhibit and they were completed in a little over 3 months. now nearly 10 years later there are so many completed projects and validating the intial transcriptiosn have become another major goal of the initiative.

How easy or not it was to get started and to participate:

It was super easy to get started on a project, no subscription or email verification was needed making it as accessible as possible. The only thing you needed to get started was patience and your computer. The work was also very user friendly after a couple minutes of understanding how to click through menus, see what the transcription was and then validating its digital inscription.

How well you felt you did your work:

Working through a menu could take anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours depending on the size of the document, its age, and the language that it was first published in. Usually the older, or rather– the worse preserved menus took longer than those with clear writing. I found a couple of errors as I worked through this project and I corrected those on the spot. It helped though that I spoke french and realized that some of the words that usually needed an A had been mistranscribed to include O or U in it.

Whether you enjoyed it or not etc.:

I had a great time validating some of the menus that had already been transcribed. I also worked ona few of menus that had some of my favorite ingredients, eggplants, salmon, and cabbage. People have eaten tons of cabbage if these menus are to be considered. lol. That being said, I wish that more menus would be uploaded because I would have like to start one of my own from scratch! But its amazing to see that they have gotten so much accomplished since this project took off in 2011.

Whether you think this would be an engaging activity for people outside of school who might be casually interested in these topics:

I htink that many different kinds of people would be attracted to this sort of work including the general public interested in very detailed transcription projects but also students interested in the history of food. That being said I can also see that this would not be for everyone, especially if they are interested in exploring every single opportunity before committing to the project. The goals and themes available from this site are very limited and not everyone will enjoy committing dozens or hundreds of hours to the same exact activity.

Do you think people would be likely to continue on after their first experience?

From my personal experience I would consider (and already have) revisted this site several times in search of updates. However, i think that public retnetion will depend on their engagement with the task at hand and if they have interest in historic menus. I cannot see many people returning to this nless they really like the detailed interface of work, the subject of menus, or working within a desired dish or time period offered. The fact that it is nearly complete also might reduce engagement from new members. Some people may be disiniterested in validation and may seek pther projects where their contribution could be more substantive than it would be in this site, regardless of the interest they may have in menus.