The DH project I chose to explore this week was Rythm of Food, which, in my opinion, does a good job of showing trends in how humans use Google to search for food, recipes, diets, etc.
I appreciate that the website displayed some interesting trends before letting the user dive in and explore all the data. This helped me understand how to read this site’s circular year charts as I explored the data. My favorite part of this project was looking at the Before New Year’s trends and seeing a bunch of spikes in the data.
When breaking down this project, I had to think about the sources, processes, and presentation. This project is a collaboration between Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty. All the search data this project uses comes from Google Trends. Something important to note is when building this project; they used Google Knowledge Graph topics to separate the data to identify differences like “apple” and “apple computer.” The project also focuses on data from the United States. The site currently has 201 topics with 155,705 data points. When browsing Rythm of Food one will find an explanation of the charts alongside an example. There are interactive tabs to view trends by month, topic, and to search for a food.
A question I have after analyzing this project is: How would Rythm of Food (or a similar project) integrate global data while maintaining the same standards? I feel this could bring up a bunch of issues in both integrating the data as well as legibly presenting the data.
In-class discussion questions to answer: “Who is the target audience?” and “What kinds of data is being used?”
The target audience is the general public; anyone who is curious about Google search patterns and trends in food. Researchers could also be interested in this site and the data collection done in this project. All the data comes from Google Trends which is available to the general public. However, the unit of data given by Google Trends (the Google Trends score) is unknown, making it essentially impossible to accurately quantify this data.
