Indian Community Cookbooks Project (ICCP) is an open-access archive of Indian community cookbooks, directed by Khushi Gupta, Muskaan Pal, and Ananya Pujary. It presented cookbooks from different communities and create visualizations based on those cookbooks.
structure of the project:
Source: community cookbooks from across India, with images and texts, and also metadata of when those books are made and where they are collected.
Process: The cookbooks are digitalized by both photoed and transcribed into text. They are also being organized into locations and cuisines. The cook time are also being added as an attribute to each recipe.
Presentation: Visualization, including timeline (using Knight Lab’s Timeline.JS) and interactive map (using ArcGIS’s mapping). It helps to present the cookbook publication in an intuitive way. Searching for a specific dish’s recipe is also made possible.
The goal is to create an open-access archive of community cookbooks, which embody the community food memories. I could see this project in conversation with anthropology and history. Cookbooks could reflect the unique culture and tradition of the communities. Moreover, since time and location are collected, it allows people to see how traditions shift over time and vary across different regions.
The target audience is the general public. People with no background knowledge could navigate through the website to learn about cookbook stories. They might also replicate Indian cuisine at home following the recipe. Professionals or people with more knowledge of Indian culture might extract more information.
When I was breaking the project down, I found out that this project was originally a final project of three undergraduate students for their intro to DH class. Then they continued to work on this and I think it is a great project. My question is: how could people spread their projects to the general public (who are not in the DH community)?
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This seems like a really interesting and culturally relevant project. I was so surprised to learn that it was a a college DH assignment. Initially I would not have thought that there was so much to say about cookbooks, but I think the timeline and interactive map aspect of the website are really helpful for allowing users to observe change over time and area.