The “Rhythm of Food” is a digital humanities project exploring how we search for food online. During the times of the year, in different countries, and even different ways of eating, the Rhythm of Food explores how people interact and search for food online. This project’s multiple goals are identifying food trends, public awareness, and education. This website aims to not only inform people of food trends but also deepen people’s relationship with food and how it is not only searched but also used. This website identifies trends in different countries and times of the year to promote a better understanding of the dynamics behind online food-related searches.
Sources
“The Rhythm of Food,” for how detailed it is, doesn’t have that many sources to account for it’s main sources are:
FooDB: FoodDB is where they pulled most of their recipes, ingredients, and other food-related sources. It says, “FooDB is the world’s largest and most comprehensive resource on food constituents, chemistry, and biology. It provides information on both macronutrients and micronutrients, including many of the constituents that give foods their flavor, color, taste, texture, and aroma.” (FoodDB)
Google Knowledge Graph: The “Google Knowledge Graph” is where this project pulled all of its search data. It allowed them to distinguish the food apple from the company Apple in their data.
Processes
“The Rhythm of Food” has only one real service used to get and analyze its data. Google. All of this project’s data is acquired through Google and its services. This involves tapping into Google’s vast database and utilizing its search-related services to gather information. The project also likely utilizes Google Search data, which includes search queries related to food trends, recipes, diets, drinks, and other culinary topics.
Displays
This project was designed by a site called “Truth and Beauty,” which focuses on data visualization and website design. They help organizations, researchers, and businesses present relevant data meaningfully and interestingly.
Presentation: This project presents its data through a series of circular interactive graphs that identify the frequency of searches on a specific food and the time during the year when the most and least searches happen, and it can even be over multiple years. The project even goes as far as to give fun, informative, and meaningful facts about the data you are viewing that can give much-needed context at times.
My Question:
A question that came to mind when I explored the project was the influence of external factors. This project identifies and accounts for the main factors that come to mind. However, I was curious about global events, social movements, or economic changes and how the project accounted for or even if it considered facts like that. Exploring the interplay between external events and search interests could provide an incredibly interesting contextual understanding of the project that most wouldn’t consider.
5 thoughts on “Lab Assignment Week 2: Reverse Engineering a DH Project”
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I also looked at the rhythm of food project and found it super interesting. I definitely agree that it would be interesting to look at how other factors influence the popularity of different foods. The project did a good job of accounting for some events throughout the year, such as holidays, but including social movements and economic changes could really improve the visualizations.
Hello Gus your response and analysis were amazing! I also reverse-engineered this Rhythm of Food project, but you had so many interpretations and analyses that I did not come up with. When you mentioned that “This website aims to not only inform people of food trends but also deepen people’s relationship with food and how it is not only searched but also used.” it surprised me since this analysis was something I could not come up with and overlooked. I also liked how you introduced the sources and gave them a short introduction. It was easy to follow. While we looked into the same project, I was able to learn a lot from your post.
This project seems really interesting, and as you said could be very useful in enhancing the population’s relationship with food. I think it is very interesting that all of the data in this project was collected through Google; even though many of the search engine data sets are interesting, there is not much specificity on how exactly the data is calculated. This leaves a lot of room for the possible outside factors that are mentioned toward the end having a stronger or weaker effect.
Your last question on influences towards the food search data could definitely be explored in more projects based off this jump off point of Google trends/project. I’d love to see explorations on the “whys” trends happen. Maybe if Google made it easier to show/find coinciding trends that /MIGHT/ relate to eachother.
I also explored this project and I’m really impressed by the question you came up with. I think it is definitely worth exploring and will make the project more informative. Currently the project website is limited to visualizations, and customized annotations or interpretations for each food are perhaps needed, especially for those foods that are not familiar to people. One thing that may need to be considered is the cost of time for this work as the interplay may be complex.