Food Diversification Project Update

Progress: What have you done so far, who have you talked to, what have you gathered, and what have you built?

We have started thinking of ways to make our research more pointed and are looking into specific topics to cover. We are thinking about separating the information either by a decade or by specific phenomenons that would affect Carleton’s food sources (i.e. wars, food trends, global changes).  

We went in to talk to someone in archives to help us gather information on the topic of food resources at Carleton. He also brought up specific events (protests and polio) that can be put into our project as moments that may affect the food source at school. 

Another important place that we will be looking through is Catalyst to see if there is any information on our topic in general that we may be able to find. Finding important events that took place through the timeline of Carleton’s existence is something that we would want to map onto our project to show any correlations.

What issues have you run into?

The potential lack of quantitative data, and data on food sources from the decades in the past. 

Have they forced you to change your initial plan?

May result in the inability to form a cohesive, interactive web map that sufficiently interprets our overall data. The web map we originally visualized that incorporated time as an attribute may not be feasible.

Do you have a proposed solution or do you need help formulating one?

By creating visualizations for different segments of our data, we can capture an effective overview of the various facets of food over the years. For instance, a timeline might be the most viable interpretation for the history of food trends at Carleton or in the general Northfield/Rice county area, while a web map might efficiently display the locations of Carleton’s food sources today.

What applications/languages/frameworks have you selected and how are you going to implement them?

• Tentatively: Timeline (Timeline JS?), Map (Storymap?)
• As of right now, we would want to focus on using a map and a timeline together that would correlate with each other. We would want to have the timeline data correlate with the map data so that when you were looking at a specific time period on the timeline, it would show up on the map. However, we are not sure at the moment how to make this work, so further research is necessary. If we can’t get this to work together, then having the timeline with a color-coded map would work as well.

An updated timeline of deliverables

Week 8: gather data and organize it into the data set we would work with (by time period/ phenomenon)

Week 9: continue cleaning the data up to correspond with our final product and begin to compute it onto our map/ timeline

Week 10: polish up the final product to be presented

Is your project still on track?

We are still in the early stages of research in our project, but we are still on track to finish. Once our data is formed, we will be able to get a better picture of the final as a whole.