This project was a true group effort. Listed contributors are: The National Endowment for the Humanities, Michigan State University Library, MSU Department of History, and MATRIX (MSU Center for Social Science and Digital Humanities). Additionally, nearly forty people are listed on the about page and given individual credit for their role in the project.
The goal of the What America Ate (WAA) project is to preserve, publish, and share the content from the original 1930s America Eats project. As a result, all their sources for the project are primary sources from decade. In addition to the original correspondence, recipes, and photographs collected, the WAA team has also included rare community cookbooks, and created a digital archive of massive collection of “rare advertisements, pamphlets, leaflets, and food packaging materials from food companies of the time period.”
The methodologies used in this project are not presented. Nowhere on their site, nor any of the linked sites for each associated organization, could I find their process even vaguely explained. But in examining the job descriptions for the people involved, an inkling of the process can be gleaned. Job descriptions include MSU special collections & preservation members, professors of politics, American studies, and history, a photography director, a digitization specialist, seven programmers, half a dozen people who performed Optical Character Recognition, as well as a handful of designers and team members working on copyright and metadata. Inspecting the page source of the website shows they used HTML, CSS, and multiple elements of JavaScript to create the website itself.
This project was presented as an exhibit of digital editions of the original project. The exhibit portion is quite transparent; there are images of recipes and other primary sources, including photographs all over the website. The digital editions are available in multiple formats. There are the scanned images of the original documents available for viewing; there are PDF versions, and the results of all the OCR work that occurred, where the ingredients list and instruction text have been transcribed digitally.
The project’s conclusions are predominantly found in the essay and source spotlight pages. On each of these, the authors illustrate what historical cultural information can be learned from this large data set. On the spotlight page, there are questions to help users do some critical thinking about the information in the recipes and original documents. It has not been disclosed how long this project has taken, but there is the option for anyone to digitally transcribe the recipes, suggesting that it is still ongoing at least in part.
There are two main “scholarly primitives” used. The first is compare. In the Immigrants section on the Spotlight on Sources page, there are two different meatball recipes from the 30s that they suggest the user compare, then draw conclusions as to why the two are so different. The user can poke around and make comparisons between different US regions and look at the differences found in commercial recipes from advertisers against the home/community recipes. It should be noted that there is not feature to do a side by side comparison, and that it would have to be done by opening two separate windows and going back and forth. The second primitive is discovering. It occurs in the essay’s section, where historians spell out discoveries made, but also incidentally in the advertisements, such as when I looked at an ad for orange juice and discovered that in the 30s there was a vitamin G (later renamed vitamin B2).