What America Ate, is an interactive historical website published and created by Michigan State University, that allows it’s audience to become transcribers and to get in touch and depth with foods from the time of the Great Depression. To get the site to where it is today there needed to be a strong process, but what the site lacks itself is a page stating how they achieved what they did. After looking into how they achieved their final result the page that shares some of the details is linked here.
With this being said, even the linked site did not fully explain how the project was ran and the process used for the program. This site did only link back to specific parts of the sites, showing that crowd sourcing and primary food sources were very important when building the start of the site. Within doing more research, finding the white page for this project came up short, but going to the Matrix page, one of the few cited links at the bottom of the page. That linked us to the proper cite that explained some of the project.
What we do know is that the documents provided in the project were scanned in various institutions, then uploaded to the site. We know this because each document is tags with a description that labels what type it is, what year it is from, and where it was scanned. Transcriptions of these documents have been created collaboratively. We know this because the page titled Recipe Transcription calls for users to create accounts and create searchable transcriptions of original document scans. We assume that most of the transcriptions were done by the original creators, but there is no way of knowing for sure since credit is not given to transcribers. To make sure the sources were compiled the use of the program Kora is able to compile features and files to make each site as tight knit as it should be.
Admittedly, the creators of What America Ate were not entirely transparent about their methodology, which reflects badly on it. A good digital humanities project is open source and clear about the way it was created so that others can contribute or expand on it. One of the many faults with What America Ate was the understanding of how they were able to code the “map” on their main page.
One of the many reasons it could not be classified as a map is because the coding says that it is actually a jpeg image. The United States as a whole is first animated and coded to light up and indicate you of what section and state that you want to find a recipe from the time.
This can not be called a map but it can be called what it is “Image Facilitated Browsing”
They coded and animated jpegs of each individual state and each section it falls into e.i. Northwest, Southern.
