The project I explored is “The Rhythm of Food” . It is a digital platform created by Google News Lab in collaboration with Truth & Beauty, a data visualization studio. The platform is used to explore the seasonal patterns and cultural rhythms surround food and recipes.
“The Rhythm of Food” visualizes how search interest in various foods, beverages, and cooking terms fluctuates over time, often revealing fascinating seasonal trends. For example, in the picture below, we know that watermelon is most searched from June to July, which makes sense. Because the weather is really hot in June and July, and watermelon is widely regarded as the best food for cooling in summer. As a result, people may search watermelon more for online shopping. As seen, the platform presents this information through interactive and aesthetically engaging visualizations, making it an accessible and visually striking way to understand how food interests ebb and flow throughout the year.
According to the web page, the data of the project is collected weekly from Google Trends for hundreds of dishes and ingredients over 15 years,(sources) and then the result it plotted on a year clock just like the one in the image above (process & presentation). Plus, based on my knowledge on statistics, there are much more processes from the data collection to the final plotting that the platform does not mention, such as data cleaning (e.g. removing irrelevant data, ordering the data by certain variables), so I can imagine it is a big work (processes).
Since the project summarizes the searching trend of different categories of food in an engaging way, I believe the goal is to provide users a better sense of what food is preferred by mass public in a particular season, so that they can make a better choice of food for their own. As a result, it has the connection with the academic field of food sciences, in which food sciences can explain whether the trend is truly correct in terms of physical wellbeing, or it is actually a common misunderstanding. Having these two determined, the target audience can be any people who take special care of food and health (housewives/househusbands who do the grocery shopping, food science students etc.)
Back to the example image above, I am not quite sure what different colors mean in this case. Maybe I didn’t read the project carefully enough, but I have not found a pattern that could explain what warm and cold colors represent respectively. In addition, I found that we can access the details of each data point by simply moving the mouse on it, and it shows the corresponding google trends score and the record date, and I am just curious about how the google trend score is calculated.
