The Rhythm of Food is an interactive website that sheds light on the many facets of food seasonality, as seen through the lens of search interest in the United States over the last 15 years.
-Rhythm of Food team
Sources: The creators of The Rhythm of Food used data from Google Trends to figure out the most-searched-for foods at different times of the year. In order to distinguish words with different meanings (i.e. apple computers vs. the fruit apple), the creators used Google Knowledge Graph.
The creators of this project also used information from FooDB, a resource on food constituents, chemistry and biology, to figure out the ingredients of different types of dishes.
Processes: The processes of this project are the popularities of a diverse selection of different foods collected from Google Trends data. In order to create the graphics seen on the website, the creators needed to use the number of times people searched for all the different types of foods. After collecting this data, the creators of The Rhythm of Food statistically processed it and made graphs that displayed these trends.
Presentation: The website uses year clocks to display most of its data. A year clock is a circular graph with all twelve months represented on a different portion of the circle. The year clocks present a unique perspective on the seasonality of different types of foods.
What is the goal of the project? The goal of the Rhythm of Food project is to present the seasonality of different types of foods by showing Google trends of foods over the past 15 years.
Which academic fields do you see the project in conversation with? Because this project shows the history, progression, and trends of food over the last 15 years, it’s most closely related to sociology. Sociology is defined as, “the study of the development of human society”, which can include the study of historical food trends.
What are the components of the project? The components of the project are year graphs. The goal of these year graphs is to show the trends of different types of food over the past week, month, year, and series of years.
By collecting data about food trends and using unique data visualization tools (year graphs), the creators of The Rhythm of Food were able to effectively depict the trends of food in America.
One reply on “Analysis of The Rhythm of Food”
Hi Teagan, I briefly skimmed over the food website and i like how you clearly explained each layer of the black box and the overall point of the website!