One of the things I enjoy greatly about digital humanities (DH) assignments is how we are sent off into the field to uncover and report on the gamut of interesting projects out there. Recently, the second-year DH students worked on a landscape assignment for our practicum, which involved a close analysis of the goals, methodology and design of a digital project. I worked on the The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Art, Science, Medicine (henceforth, The Recipes Project). The rest of this blog post will be an excerpt of that assignment.
The Recipes Project is an international collaborative project revolving around recipe studies that consists of a blog, social media platforms on Twitter and Facebook and a Zotero page. The project is conceptualized as a “long-term digital research network, fostering conversations amongst researchers at all stages of their careers.”[1]
Unfortunately, information about the project’s stated goals and methodology do not appear anywhere on the main site. The “About” page mainly states an invitation for readers to join researchers in exploring the recipes as well as gives an overview of other platforms off the main site, along with a description of the project’s activities on Facebook and Twitter (where relevant links are shared) and a Zotero page (where a bibliography of historical recipe collections and recipe-related secondary readings are shared). For the rest of the post I will focus on the main blog site.
The founders of the project are Elaine Leong (a scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) and Lisa Smith (a lecturer at the University of Sussex), who are also co-editors. The core structure of the team appears to consist of two editorial teams (one for blog articles and another for social media) and three administrative assistants. The key team members are academics from various institutions, librarians, independent scholars and a graduate student. There does not appear to be a clearly defined editorial policy.
Site Functions, Users, and Arguments
Since the main site chiefly consists of interdisciplinary blog posts aimed to highlight current trends in recipe studies and/or exciting archival discoveries, blog post contributors also play a key role in building the project. Detailed information is available on the blog for researchers who wish to contribute articles. Contributor sign-up sheets are also sent to the project’s mailing list. Students also contribute to these posts and are acknowledged on a separate page.
Blog articles are clustered together to form a “thematic series”. These articles are in turn guest-edited by field specialists, who therefore also contribute to the project. The articles’ tone and subject matter suggest that they are intended for researchers and readers who are interested in knowing more about the academic aspects of recipes.
Each curated series puts forth a unique argument. For instance, the “Translating Recipes” series argues that the “plurality and multitude of different recipe forms” should be regarded as a genre and mode of storytelling. Overall, the site’s and project’s main argument is that recipe studies is worthy of serious academic attention. The blog articles, Zotero bibliography, and social media posts are used to push that argument forward.
Design, Accessibility and Usability
The website has a simple design that makes navigation smooth. The colors (grey/black font against a white background) of the website also contrast well and the font for the blog posts are large which make reading easy. The headers at the top of the page were clear, gave me an insight into what the site’s main functions were and brought me to the pages that I was expecting. I particularly appreciated that there was an “Additional Resources” page which was useful for further research. The headers were also laid out in a logical manner from left to right. It was also useful to have a sidebar showing recent posts, giving a user or prospective contributor an idea of what the current thematic series is and when the site was last updated.
The titles for the thematic series were well-written and piqued my interest. The broad themes achieved the project’s aim of being interdisciplinary as various types of contributors could write about their research on various recipes. Having a chronological order for articles within each thematic series, with introductory articles (where present) placed at the top was useful in giving me a suggested reading order. I also enjoyed the incorporation of images into the blog posts and the inclusion of footnotes and hyperlinks, which allowed for the exploration of further resources. The footnotes and hyperlinks also made it clear to me that it was a scholarly enterprise by showing that the information was being drawn from reputable sources. I also liked the links to each contributor’s profile, which further highlighted the “network” aspect of the project’s aim by allowing scholars working in similar fields to connect with one another.
The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool also gave the site a good score. Alternative text was mostly present and the site was also mobile friendly.
Areas for Improvement
The landing page did not give much insight into what the project is, so including a small box with a brief description of the project would have been useful. I also felt that there should not have been entire blog posts on the landing page, as that was too much to scroll through. Older posts were also obscured by the latest one. I would suggest that the posts be structured as previews with only a line or two of the article included, which would make scrolling easier. I also felt that having previews of blog posts with photo thumbnails would increase the visual appeal of the landing page, as it currently looks too cluttered in text.
The “About” page had too much white space on the left which makes the page look cramped. The font could be bigger and more information could have been included on the project’s methodology.
[1] Leong et. al, “The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, accessed August 25, 2020, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/recipes-project-food-magic-art-science-and-medicine.
Regina Hong is a second year MA in Digital Humanities candidate and a Sesquicentennial Scholar at the Women and Leadership Archives. Her scholarly interests lie in the history of migration, pedagogy and textual ephemera. She enjoys cooking, reading, and figuring out how to keep her plants alive.
