Digital Humanities project, The Rhythm of Food, from Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty, is an excellent example of the interdisciplinary links within DH and the capability for technology to create new ways to visualize information. The interactive year clock pictured below shows the site’s characteristic visualization of data.
The image may be a bit difficult to understand initially, but this project is based on a straightforward premise: to display and track specific food trends over time. To achieve this, collaborators gathered Google search trend data, facilitated by the Google Knowledge Graph API. The Google knowledge graph allows user input text strings to be contextualized based on other user searches related to the initial search. The Google Data Team also drew upon FooDB, a food database that listed hundreds of food items, ingredients, and recipes. When all the search data was collected, it was visually organized into the year clocks. The distance from the center labeled that term’s popularity, and the different colors showed different years.
How visually appealing, but what use does this data serve? My first instinct was to think that the fields of anthropology and sociology were the only benefactors. However, this trend data could also be used for marketing and product design, helping companies create seasonal products. A slight obstacle to the full use of this information is that search data is protected under Google’s privacy policy. Therefore, I don’t know how feasible it is to obtain all of the data used for this project in outside settings.
My two questions about this project are if there was a more intuitive way to show trend spikes depending on the season rather than the initially confusing year clock. The other one is more of a curiosity: How were the animations for the page made, and by who? There are multiple people in charge of design and I wish that the page explained that process more.
