Introduction:
The digital humanities project that I chose to explore this week was The Rhythm of Food — by Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty. The goal of this project is to use Google search trends in order to anylize food and how regional differences, seasons, and holidays play a role in what is the most popular search. This project uses visual imagery in order to display their data.
The Break Down:
Sources:
- FooDB
- this was a good starting point when it came to anilyzing the different food related terms
- Google Trends
- the whole project was essencial based off of this
- what food related search trends are taking place?
- Google Knowledge Graph
- google’s database that contains billions of facts of pertaining to many things
- Collected search data from 2004-2018
Processes:
- Data Visualisation
- turned the data from the goodle search trends into the form of digital models referred to as a year clock graph
Presentation:
- Various circular graphs that show the months in a year
- the different colors on the graphs represent the years in which the search data was derrived
- There are a few linear graphs that shows how search interest has changed over the course of 15 years between 2004 and 2018
- Text and annotation
- Help with the flow of the project and the accesability
Questions
Something that I thought about as I was looking at this project is how would they account for the possibility of some of the food related searches not being about food at all? What I mean by this is, say there is a trending nonfood related item that simply has a name of a certain food. How would they take this into account? I imagine that this issue would make this project not as usefull for dietitians or anyone in that relm to use the data for their own professional work. I think that this makes the project more of a fun thing for anyone who may be curious as to what the food search trends are throughout the year.
Answers
Does the site make an argument? If so, what?
This site makes the argument that seasonal change, regional aspects, and holidays all indeed have an influence on the Google search trends and it’s not just a coincidence that many people are searching up the same things around the same time of year.
Which academic fields (i.e history) do you see the project in conversation with?
Although earlier I said that the data may not be completly accurate, I think that if taken with a grain of salt, people in the health/life style fields might find it interesting to take into account. I also think that the project is mostly in conversatgion in Google and their systems. It might be relevant in conversations pertaining to improving the alghorithm for Google users.
