I looked at the Rhythm of Food. This project was a collaboration between Google News Labs and Truth&Beauty with the goal of exploring how Google search history reveals food trends in the US over time. Researchers collected data from google trends each week between 2004 and 2018. Data was then plotted on a year clock, which was the main component of of the project. An example of a year clock is shown below.
The google search data came google knowledge graph topics. This API allows users to find relevant information for search results. Once the data was collected and plotted, it was organized into different display groups. The three categories on the website are monthly trends, common patterns, and the explore feature.
The monthly trends section allows you to see the six most popular foods for each month. For each individual food, there is a year clock as well as a line graph showing the frequency of the food over time. Some of the graphs also tell you if there is a significant event in that month related to the popularity of the food. For example, nachos are one of the most popular foods in February because of Super Bowl Sunday.
The common patterns section shows what foods appear only at certain points in the year, and breaks down why that might be. For example, some foods, like blueberries, have a natural season which makes them more popular during a certain time of the year. Other foods, such as fruit salad, have peaks at specific holidays and special events. While the website mainly looks at the US, there is a subsection showing how seasonality varies across the world. For example, apples are consistently popular throughout the year in Australia, but peak on New Year’s Eve in Russia.
The final section of the website allows you to explore a variety of foods by choosing a type such as dishes or beverages, when it is popular like the season, and specific special categories like trending. After exploring the website, I’m very curious what more recent data would look like since it only goes up until 2018. I’m especially curious to see how trends would’ve differed during covid, since there were certain food trends that occurred during covid as a result of quarantine.
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Your blog post illustrates that you have a clear understanding of the DH project you have reverse-engineered, however, I do have some suggestions that you could take into consideration if you like. I think it would be nice to have labels for what distinct paragraphs could be about, making it much easier for the reader to know what each paragraph is about. Also, another useful thing would’ve been linking the examples you have mentioned to make it easier for curious users to look them up for themselves. Lastly, I believe there might have been some missing parts to this post such as answering questions from the class discussion and if it is included in your post, I wasn’t able to tell where exactly they were. Overall, it was well detailed and various examples were provided making it very clear and easy to understand what the DH project was about.