Draft:What's on the menu?

“What’s on the Menu?” is an innovative crowdsourcing project developed by the New York Public Library (NYPL) that aims to collect, preserve, and analyse historical menus.., and it is collected in the Lehigh List of Digital Humanities Projects . That said, the on-going project is not only a preservation effort, but a dynamic, user-driven platform for engaging with culinary history on multiple levels, from personal storytelling to academic research.

Functions

The project can be broken down into several key components, each contributing to its goal of preserving and researching historical menus. These parts work together to engage both the public and researchers in documenting the history of food culture.

1. Menu and Dish Browsing Features

The website has an extensive database of historical menus from various periods and locations, allowing users to learn about a range of information. The website can "tell us, for example, the price of a cup of coffee in 1890, when peach melba peaked in popularity, the varieties of oysters consumed in 19th-century New York, and what was served in the dining car of President McKinley’s funeral train."

2. User Submission Features

• Menu adding: users can send historical menus they discovered to the team via email. Contributors provide essential metadata, including the menu's date, location, restaurant name, and descriptions of the dishes, to facilitate proper cataloging.

• Menu Reviewing: The public are encouraged to transcribe and review the menus uploaded to the website. By enabling non-experts to contribute to the preservation and understanding of historical materials, the project opens up humanities research to a wider audience.

3&4.  Problematic Functions

3. The project plans to allow users to identify and classify the geospatial location of menus, while the geotagger tool is not working. Supposedly, this data will let people answer not only the question of “What were the prices of oysters over time?” but “What were the prices of oysters in New York City?”

4. Search function and filters. Right now, users can sort the catalogues by date, name, popularity and obscurity, but search by keywords is not yet open to the public.

History

Miss Frank E. Buttolph started gathering menus for the library in 1900. Her diligent pursuit of gathering contemporary throwaways ends up in the donation of hundreds of her own menus to the Astor Library, a key component of the New York Public Library.

Buttolph was mostly misinterpreted by a male-dominated press because of her obsession with collecting menus, which the New York Times reportedly attributed to her "feminine instincts for accumulation." She continued to collect until her death in 1924. She had accumulated over 25,000 menus by that point, and her collection was known as the Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection (1851-1930).

The collection receive much attention in the press. Newspapers including The New York Times and The Times have reported on this. Launched in April 2011, the "What's on the Menu" collaborative menu transcription project was initiated by the NYPL to fulfill the requirements of its scholars.

The ambitious project—spearheaded by Ben Vershbow, Director of NYPL Labs, and co-curated by librarians Rebecca Federman and Michael Inman, Curator of Rare Books—envisions an easily accessible electronic “database of dishes.”

The Buried Downturn

With "alcove reader" priviledge, researchers had better access to sections of books related to their interests. Buttolph's alcove was cleared out in 1921, thereby dismissing her from the library. The reason for this dismissal is not completely clear, but letters from Buttolph and from library staff, patrons, and the director suggest that she had come into increasing personal conflict with the people working around her. In hindsight, the charges in the NYPL file appear to have been made in order to hasten her discharge. Among the charges against her were book theft and using the alcove for collecting things that weren't from the library. Buttolph consistently insisted that her work was done for the library and for upcoming historians, refuting these accusations. She passed away from pneumonia at Bellevue Hospital in 1924.

This concludes in a depressing way.

Influence

Building on Buttolph’s heritage, “What’s on the Menu?” stands out for several reasons, particularly in its approach to crowdsourcing and interdisciplinary research.

1. Crowdsourcing Approach

By allowing the public to submit and review menus, the project democratises the process of historical documentation, enabling diverse community voices to contribute to cultural heritage preservation. Its online database makes historical menus accessible to a global audience, significantly enhancing people’s understanding of  history.

The huge success evident in the project website’s popularity paves the way for future projects using the crowdsourcing approach. Inviting the public to engage with material culture and archives through this kind of participatory practice has become key for heritage institutions

2. Interdisciplinary Research Facilitation

• The project provides valuable data for educators and researchers, allowing them to explore shifts in food culture, economic trends, public health (concerning the change in food allergies) and societal changes through the lens of dining practices. Research in disciplines such as history, economics, sociology, gastronomy and literary studies can all benefit from data collected regarding the menu setting

• On the other hand, the structured data generated through menu transcription is crucial for Digital Humanities research. Text-mining and data visualisation tools can be used to reveal patterns and trends in food culture over time.

The Team Behind

The "What's on the Menu?" project was brought to life by a multidisciplinary team of experts who combined technical, historical, and organizational skills to make this ambitious project a reality. The core team consisted of the following members and skills:

Librarians and Curators:

Librarians and Curators played a key role in organizing and preserving the menus. They need skills of collection management, digitization and metadata creation, and knowledge of historical documents.

·       Rebecca Federman, Project Curator, The New York Public Library's Culinary Collections Librarian and Electronic Resources Coordinator.

·       Michael Inman, Project Curator, Curator of Rare Books for The New York Public Library.

Developers and Data Scientists:

Developers and programmers worked to ensure that the platform was user-friendly, efficient, and scalable online. They need proficiency in web development and database management.

Data scientists worked on structuring the transcribed data, ensuring it was clean, actionable, and interoperable with other datasets. They have skills in data structuring, analysis, and processing.

·       Mauricio Giraldo, Designer/Developer, designing and developing interaction design projects.

·       Kristopher Kelly, Application Developer/Data Analyst, works on a range of internal applications.

Project director and Product manganer:

Project director need to oversaw the team’s digital efforts, including the handling of metadata and the digital infrastructur, which involves significant data curation.

Product manager ensured that all moving parts of the project—technical, archival, and public engagement—were aligned and progressing according to the timeline. They need organizational skills, coordination between different departments, and timeline management.

·       Ben Vershbow, Project Director, the Director of NYPL's Digital Library + Labs department, overseeing metadata, digitization, permissions/reproductions, and the explorations of the NYPL Labs team.

·       David Riordan, Product Manager

Technology Needed

Digitization and Image Process

·       Menus are scanned and stored in high-resolution JPEG2000 format, which allows for lossless compression and detailed zoom capabilities. The project uses Djatoka Server to dynamically serve these images, allowing users to zoom into specific areas without the need to load large files all at once.

Text Extraction and Data Processing

·       Optical Character Recognition (OCR): It is used to convert scanned images of the menus into machine-readable text, but it struggles with older fonts, damaged documents, and unusual layouts, often producing errors. This is why manual transcription by crowdsourcing is crucial to the project.

·       Crowdsourcing Platform: A custom-built transcription platform was developed using Ruby on Rails, which allows volunteers to manually transcribe menu data. The real-time interaction with the transcription process ensures accurate data input directly into a structured database.

Data Access and Interactivity

·       API（Application Programming Interface）: The API allow external developers and researchers to interact with the transcribed data programmatically. This enables users to create new tools, analysis frameworks, and visualizations that leverage the menu data.

·       Cloud Infrastructure: Heroku is used as the cloud platform for the project, ensuring that the application can scale efficiently, handle high traffic volumes, and maintain performance during peak periods.

Visualization and User Interaction

·       To make the menu data more engaging and accessible, the project integrates data visualization tools. These visualizations help users explore trends in food, prices, and restaurants over time.

Web Development

·       Front-End: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are used to create the user interface (UI).

·       Back-End: The back-end of the platform relies on databases to manage the large volume of transcribed data.

Challenges Ahead

There are pros and cons of the crowdsourcing approach assumed by the projects intended to engage the public. Through crowdsourcing, the initiators are not able to better recognize the contributions of the top transcribers, or to develop a hierarchy of tasks where more challenging work might be offered to the more experienced participants, thus enhancing the efficiency.