- Café Bon Appétit. “LDC Menu Data from Fall 2018-Winter 2024.” Carleton College, 2024.
- Format: The menus are stored in excel files. Each file is for half of the term and contains five sheets, each for a week. The menus are plain texts with the category, dish name, and tags for ingredients, such as vegan and vegetarian. In order to visualize food trends and dietary preferences, we will need to reorganize the raw data in time series and count the times the dishes and the tags for ingredients of our interest were offered on a weekly or monthly level.
- Rights: The menus were provided by the General Manager of Cafe Bon Appetit at Carleton, Charlie Schwandt, per our request. We were allowed to use the data for our project to make analysis and visualizations. The consent was expressed through the email.
- Privacy/ethics: No privacy concerns as they were opened to public.
- Data in the Google Drive can be accessed here.
- Texts/photos/video footage from the Archives
- Citation: Digital Collections, Carleton College Archives, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, https://www.carleton.edu/library/collections/archives/digital/, 22 February 2024
- Format: The Carleton College Archives host a variety of photographs and video footage of past campus events related to the dining experience throughout the College’s history. The photographs will be both digital .jpg images downloadable from the Digital Archives or print ones curated in the Gould Library. In order to digitize the print photos, we will first scan them into pdfs and then convert them into .png or .jpg files. We will also obtain audio recordings (in .mp3 format) from a past oral history project and video/film footage (in ? format) from past student productions.
- Rights: All the material is owned by the Carleton College Archives. We are allowed to use the sources because they are openly accessible on the Archives Database. As explicitly stated on the Archives webpage, “Students, faculty, and other researchers are welcome to use the resources housed in the Carleton College Archives.” We can easily download the material by simply clicking on the “Download” button on the top left corner of the image/video footage.
- Privacy/ethics: Past Carleton students, faculty, staff, and alumni are all depicted in the photographs and videos, which record dining activities people have been involved in. Although we are unsure if some of the candid photos were taken with consent, they have been open-access in the Archives for a long time. So we consider that any privacy issues have already been addressed and that there is no sensitive information that needs to be removed.
- Photo sources:
- Video sources:
- The Carletonian, 1878- Present. Carleton College Digital Archives, https://edu.arcasearch.com/usmncar/. Accessed 2024.
- Format: Carletonian records are pdf documents on the Carleton Digital Archive website. In order to conduct text analysis, we want to have all the information in a txt file. We can just copy from the website and paste it into a txt file.
- Rights: owned by Carleton College. We are allowed to use all archived Carletonian records. We are free to use the database known from here.
- Privacy/ethics: All the data are open-access. The data contains the names of editors and writers, but I think we don’t need to remove that since they willingly attached their names to these articles.
- Interview with the sous chef of Bon Appetit at Carleton
- Format: recordings and word records.
- Rights: the rights is preserved by Carleton College LDC sous chef Vale Riggs; We asked for his permission.
- Privacy/ethics: We will make sure to inform the interviewee that the information will be used for our project only, and there should be no privacy concern.
- Headley, Leal A, and Merrill E Jarchow. Carleton College: The First Century. Carleton College, 1966. Carleton College Historical Documents, Northfield-Rice County Digital History Collection, https://contentdm.carleton.edu/digital/collection/Archives/id/4169. Accessed 22 Feb. 2024.
- Jarchow, Merrill E. Carleton Moves Confidently into Its Second Century, 1966-1992. Carleton College, 1992. Carleton College Historical Documents, Northfield-Rice County Digital History Collection, https://contentdm.carleton.edu/digital/collection/Archives/id/1963. Accessed 22 Feb. 2024.
- Format: These books have been digitized and are available as part of Carleton’s Digital Collections. Since we are using these books for general background research, we don’t need them to be in a specific format to gather data. Since they’ve been digitized, the books are easily searchable for keywords such as “dining” and “meals” which will help us find information in these very long books.
- Rights: As the publisher, Carleton College owns the rights to these books. The website specifically lists terms of use, so as long as we credit the source and correctly quote or paraphrase.
- Privacy/ethics- Because this data is generalized and has been accessible for a long time, I do not think there are any privacy concerns.
3 thoughts on “Source Documentation – Food At Carleton”
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I’m looking forward to the patterns that your group project will discover about food at Carleton. Your group has many data sources to consult and create accurate data visualization. However, our group didn’t obtain data in a format similar to Excel files for our project. The unavailability of data forced our group to enter the data manually in a spreadsheet.
This is a really interesting research topic and I am curious to see what data you will come out with. This is also a great topic since there is so much data available for it, and I think that the way you are obtaining the data is well documented and the categories that you are separating them by makes sense.
Woah what a cool project idea! I worked in Burton during my freshman fall, so I feel very familiar with the menus beyond just eating them – so I’ll be super interested in some of the results that your group gets back on the menus. I’m glad you have great data to work with for your project to since it doesn’t sound too difficult to obtain most of the information that y’all were looking for.