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.