Digital History: What's on the Menu?

Food history was buzzing online last week - Ian Mosby's post on Active History discussed problems with popular locavore author Michael Pollan's rule about only eating food your great-grandmother would recognize, and it came only a day after this Star article about the University of Guelph's 13,000-volume Culinary Collection. Public historians should recognize the importance of studying food - the politics and social norms surrounding serving and preparing food can tell us so much about different eras, and describing (or even creating) old recipes can really grab the public's interest. As Mike Ridley, U of Guelph's chief librarian, says, "the fastest way to people’s minds is through their stomachs".

I was reading Food Network Magazine not too long ago when I came across a mention of a New York Public Library project, What's on the Menu?. The NYPL has one of the world's largest historical menu collections, with over 40,000 holdings, 10,000 of which are scanned. To make this amazing resource even more user-friendly, the NYPL has started a transcription project with those scanned menus, and they are enlisting the help of the public to help them with the huge project.

Their aim is to have all the menu items and prices transcribed for each menu, so dishes can be easily searchable by whomever wants to search them - academic historians, museum curators creating an exhibit, historical fiction writers, chefs, the list goes on. The NYPL plans to do this by letting internet users look through the menus and transcribe the items and prices into a text box. Users don't have an account, and there is no log-in - anyone who visits their web page is pointed towards menus that need transcribing. They hope, of course, that visitors read the Help section first - which details what to transcribe, what to skip, and how to format.

This is an great way to have data easily searchable and available to anyone with an internet connection. Why not allow users to transcribe data? Everything is reviewed by staff (though I can't imagine how long it will take to review 642,961 - and counting - dishes). One would assume that the job won't be perfect, but isn't it better than not having anything searchable or digitized at all? It reminds me of the oh so cruel Why you shouldn't become an archivist video that made the rounds last year. One character points out archivists will toil away (in a basement, of course) processing a large collection that no one will use - until someone finally does, but that person will be angry that the entire collection isn't digitized. The video is a joke, of course, but it does point out that researchers expect a lot from these collections - and records aren't serving their purpose if they're not easily accessible. In this digital age, accessibility is key - for researchers and, really, for anyone with an interest in history.

One interesting aspect is the Data section, where the NYPL lets users download the collected raw data and use whatever creative tools they can to analyze, interpret, or even create games with the data. The NYPL clearly understands the use of crowdsourcing - something I touched upon way back in January 2009 when discussing the Smithsonian's digital reputation. Maybe a software engineer will come up with something brilliant - using knowledge a trained historian wouldn't have. If only Miss Frank E. Buttolph could imagine how the collection she started in 1900 for the NYPL would be used in 2011.

Recent Exhibit: Grace Kelly: From Movie Star to Princess

Anyone who attended the Toronto International Film Festival would have seen the trailer for the TIFF Bell Lighbox fall exhibition about Grace Kelly. The swelling music, the comparisons to Diana and Kate Middleton, the promise of showing her dresses and "yes, even her Oscar".

Now would I have normally paid 15$ to see this (let's admit, fluffy) exhibit? Well, no, but after recently purchasing a discounted TIFF staff membership, I had free admission. And I have always liked Grace Kelly. I actually read a biography of her back in my younger days, and I very rarely read Hollywood biographies. I had seen a good handful of her movies. So really, why not wander over and see what they have?

This was my second time in the exhibit space at the Lightbox and again I hated it. You enter the exhibit through an awkwardly large glass door that looks like an exit. Inside there is one large room, and it's never clear which way to go through - last year I walked through their Tim Burton exhibit backwards. For this exhibit, you walk into a large introductory room, but then are given a choice of paths - and I again took the wrong one. It didn't make too much difference, but I can't imagine it's just me who finds it very unclear.

There is also a separate room off to the side, again with large glass doors that are always closed. It worked well for this exhibit, as it featured one of their prized possessions - a recreation of Kelly's wedding dress. But again, it's not very welcoming and interrupts the flow of the exhibit.

In general, I had two complaints about the exhibit. The first isn't too surprising, once it's clear that one of the organizers is the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. The point of the exhibit is to celebrate Grace Kelly, and how wonderful she was. It is to marvel at her transformation from upper-class all-American girl to Hollywood leading lady to actual royalty. The exhibit is possible because the archives in Monaco lent her personal items - we see telegrams she received early on in her acting career, clothing she wore, letters she received from close friends such as Alfred Hitchcock, and even home movies she shot of her young family in the 1960s. These are all wonderful artifacts, but it also means that anyone looking for a hint of scandal will leave disappointed. Not that there was ever much gossip about Grace Kelly (she left Hollywood quite young, at the age of 26), but there was nothing negative about her at all. We are meant believe she was the epitome of style and grace, and never made a mistake or had a difficult moment in her life.

There is one letter that stands out among all the others on display. Most are congratulatory, discussing film roles or her Oscar nomination and win in 1955. One, however, is from her father. He writes what he describes as a painful letter, telling her that he and her mother are very disappointed about her relationship at the time with fashion designer Oleg Cassini. This British Vogue article mentions a 2003 biography of Kelly that argues she and Cassini never married because her parents disapproved (he was older, foreign and divorced). Her father, for that matter, was never supportive of his daughter's acting career either. While the exhibit briefly mentions she dated Cassini, it basically discusses how it affected her personal style. And while it describes in great detail her first meeting with Prince Rainier of Monaco (She wasn't wearing a designer dress! The power was out at the hotel so she couldn't blow-dry her hair!), it glosses over how their relationship grew, how they kept in touch, and why they got engaged so quickly - only about six months after meeting.

My second complaint was a complete lack of Kelly's own voice in the exhibit. The only words from Kelly's own mouth were a few quotes on the walls of the exhibit. Everything else - the telegrams, the letters - are written to her. The exhibit does a fine job of taking us through her early days in show business (modeling photographs, magazine covers) to her days as a top actress (movie posters, shooting scripts, film clips) to her days as a royal princess (archival footage of her arrival in Monaco, her clothing) but nothing gives the audience the sense that they know this woman more than any other fan would have in the 1950s. As the TIFF website states, the exhibit wants to celebrate "a figure sure in her own self-creation, fully aware of her consecutive, iconic roles as movie star, bride and Princess of Monaco." And that's what we see throughout the exhibit - the glossy creation known as Grace Kelly, superstar. The young woman who went through these transformations might have been more interesting.

Recent Visit: Lower East Side Tenement Museum

I finally had a chance to see the Lower East Side Tenement Museum when I was in New York last month. I had heard of the museum a few years back, and was looking forward to taking a tour with one of their volunteer docents.

The price was a little steep - 20$ for an adult - but I hope it doesn't stop people from visiting because the museum gives glimpses into a part of New York's history that isn't unknown, but probably doesn't get the attention it deserves from most tourists. In a city like New York it's easy to spend the majority of your time at the big tourist destinations, and ignore the smaller museums. I find it hard sometimes just to leave mid-town Manhattan! But this museum, which focuses on the immigrant experience over multiple decades, is definitely worth a visit.

Visitors must take guided tours, which last roughly an hour, so first there was some waiting around in their gift shop/visitor centre. Luckily their gift shop is full of interesting books on New York and immigrant history. There is also a short film that visitors can watch.

Our docent met us in the shop and then we were led across the street to 97 Orchard, a five-floor tenement building built in the 1860s. The building had been closed down in the 1930s (the landlord couldn't afford to pay for some renovations) and basically shut for the next fifty years. The storefront was in use, but the apartments above stood empty up until the 1980s, when the museum founders were looking for a space for their museum. The museum consists of restored apartments based on specific families, and there is a wide variety - the Irish, Russians, Germans and Italians are all represented. Our tour was "Getting By", which talked about how immigrants lived, worked, and what happened if they hit hard times. It focused on two apartments and families - The Gumpertz family, German Jews in the 1870s, and the Baldizzi family, Italian Catholics in the 1930s.

The docent used a variety of interpretive tools, including artifacts (furniture, textiles, photographs) in the apartments, photocopies of census lists, oral histories, even a court transcript to talk about the families and the Lower East Side in general. To give us the feel for the period she would describe what language we would have heard on the street, where people may have worked, what shops would have been nearby. But the real star was the building itself.

The museum would have lost a lot of its impact if it hadn't been housed in that tenement building. Immediately walking in you were transported back 100 years. The hallway was tiny, the walls dingy. The cramped air felt worse once the docent described how dark it would have been, how many families lived in the building, coming and going at all hours. The public toilets weren't installed until 1901, gas lighting not until 1905, electricity not until the 1920s.

The apartments themselves were tiny - how did a family with several children live in a three-room apartment with one window? The Gumpertz family used outhouses in the backyard, and had no running water. The Baldizzi family had only three rooms as well, and an air shaft between their apartment and their neighbour's left little privacy. It was amazing to listen to how Mr. Gumpertz had left for work one day and never came back - no one ever found out what happened to him - and to stand in the apartment where his widow and children learned to live without him. We listened to Josephine Baldizzi speak about living at 97 Orchard as a small child - remembering how her family played checkers at the kitchen table and what brand of soap her mother kept above the sink. The docent made good attempts at getting us to comment on what we saw, asking us lots of questions - "What would it have been like?" - and though we weren't the chattiest group, the message came across.

The tour included a quick look at some unrestored apartments, where the shopkeepers stored their goods and used the walls to do inventory lists while the building was closed. The building isn't in the best condition, and I hope the museum has the funds to keep their programmes going while making sure the building survives well into the 21st century.

The museum's website is really well done, with big, clear text and graphics. It is easy to navigate and lets visitors know how they put the museum together. I especially like their use of crime scene photos to look at furnishings - "Note the Decor. Ignore the Body". I would definitely recommend a visit if you're in New York. It's easy to get swept up in the grandeur of Fifth Ave but history is definitely alive in the Lower East Side.