A working suite for food scholars.
When understood as an academic tool, the atlas is a powerful archiving and data analysis tool. It uses citizen-science and interviews to build a contemporary record what people cook, eat, and remember.
Our methodology
1. Participants take surveys, record audio or video, or submit photos of artifacts
2. Before publication, our researchers analyze the incoming source and link it to a person, place, or date through our interview analysis tool in the hidden admin suite. This translates qualitative stories into quantitative data while still preserving and storing the qualitative (ie. we never get rid of the raw submissions or transcripts).
3. Over time, that turns into a couple of different resources: (1) a quantitative dataset with primary and secondary sources and 9 analysis bearing variables and thousands of multivariable analysis opportunities, (2) a massive interview library, (3) a digital archive of cookbooks and oral histories that may have otherwise been lost to time.
4. What you do with those resources is yet to be seen. If you want to see any of them be created, visit the collaborators page.
What do you have questions about?
Map it
The atlas map is a research instrument, not decoration. Compare a dish across regions, compare regions against each other, and filter by whether a respondent cooks it, eats it, lives there, or comes from there. County-level in the South, region-level abroad.
Open the map →Analyze it
The Explorer pivots the full dataset: pick what you're counting and what you're grouping by, and read the cross-section. Dishes per location, recipes per contributor, oral histories per decade. The dish browser carries the underlying records for each row.
Open the data suite →Learn the data model
The schema is unusual, because oral history is unusual — a dish record, an editorial layer, and a community layer that never overwrite each other. If you're building something similar, or want to critique ours, get in touch and we'll walk you through it.
Email the team →Use the dataset
PII-separated, versioned, and available in CSV, JSON, XLSX, .dta, and .rds. Downloads are password-protected and given out by conversation, not by click.
See the export bundles →