Members: Ginifer Coffin, Faith Yim, Daniel Chung, Lucklita Theng
Project Topic: Carleton’s Food: Where Does it Come From?
Proposed Methodology:
- We are planning on using data from the Carleton food providers from the past decade or so (ex. Bon Appetit). The information we will be specifically interested in staple food products (meat, dairy, vegetables, grains) and where they come from.
- Sources: We will be looking through Carleton College’s archives and be asking the data specialist on campus if there is more information. In addition, the Northfield Historical Society may also have data on historical sources of food in this area of Minnesota.
- We would like to use excel/ spreadsheets/ .csv to gather the data and store it
- We want to analyze the data and see how local the products have stayed (or haven’t) throughout the years. If we can go back enough, we want to see if there is an effect of changes in factors like farming practices (big vs/ small farms), globalization, construction of food processing factories, logistics of shipping and food delivery, etc.
- ArcGis will serve as the main mapping and analytics platform to apply location-based analysis to our source data.
Carto mapping tool might be another great visualization tool that can analyze our data in a location based distribution while also accounting for time as an attribute.
- By creating a webmap, it would be easier to visualize where the food comes from and see how local it actually is. We will also conduct an analysis accounting for how sources have changed over time. This may be achieved through animations or a separate legend for the time attribute.
Creating a timeline may be another option to represent how sourcing for Carleton’s staple foods have changed over time.
Proposed Timeline of Deliverables:
Week 8: Initial research – gather all data needed
Week 9: Clean and analyze data; begin work on webmap
Week 10: Complete and polish final presentation (webmap and pechakucha).
Research Sources:
Carleton College Archives
Bon Appetit
Talking with Data specialists in Carleton
Northfield Historical Society (maybe)?
Here is an example of a project we would like to model off of.
2 replies on “Carleton College Food Diversification”
Wow, this project is really cool! I never even thought to see food as an object of analysis, but it seems to be a rich source of information, especially since there have been concerted efforts to gather food from local sources, cater to specific dietary needs, and provide healthier food options in general over the past ten years at Carleton. You mention that you would like to consult the Northfield Historical Society for historical sources of food in Minnesota… I think it could be interesting to compare 19th century data (of which there is much at the Historical Society I presume) with Bon Appetit’s data on Carleton food sources. I imagine they would be different, but the similarities could visualize how some local food practices in recent trends emulate earlier practices.
Team Foodways,
I like the concept of this project and think it has a lot of scope for some really interesting finds. As you point out, you could explore and visualize the development of food provisioning in a number of different ways, and I think it would make sense to employ as many of them as possible. Different team members focusing on different ways to tell stories from the data in different ways can be an effective way to divide labor, as long as all of them come together in a single website with a clear overall focus.
The map you cite as an example is custom coded, but you can get close to that kind of presentation using ESRI’s StoryMaps. I’d encourage you to explore the StoryMap example projects here to get ideas for what you might do with the platform. You could have one massive story map as your project with everything embedded within it, or embed different ones along with other components into a website.
As for data, I would encourage you to look through the finding aids for the archives and think of sources that might not be immediately relevant but may hold fascinating food data, e.g. student scrapbooks, photographs, oral histories, and written diaries. For more recent information, you can also explore the Northfield Area Data and Statistics Gould Guide.