For this blog post, I chose The Rhythm of Food, a digital humanities project created by Google to visually represent food trend searches. In other words, the project compiles data of how many times per day a certain food, dish, recipe, etc. has been searched in google, and creates a visual representation so that the searches for different foods and different times of the year can easily be compared. Below is an example of the search trends for “Pumpkin Spice Latte” in google.
As you can see through the plot that they have created, Pumpkin Spice Latte searches are significantly higher in the fall than throughout the rest of the year. Some of the foods represented on the webpage follow a similar trend for a season or a holiday, while others stay consistent year round. To me, the project falls into the anthropology field as it can be used to better understand cultural practices and how society thinks about food.
The data used for the project is from Google’s search engine data, which makes sense as the majority of the project’s contributors work at Google. They then plot the trends/how much each food has been searched by date for the past 14 years. These graphs could be beneficial for many projects. For example, if you are trying to explain how different holidays are celebrated in different countries, it is nice to have these plots of what time of year and in what countries different food’s are searched for already made.
One question that I have after taking a deep dive through this digital humanities project is if there is a way to get to the raw data. Not every food/dish/recipe is represented on this page, and you may want to represent the information in a different fashion, so it would be helpful to have access to the data that they used to create the plots.