Description: A mini-site about digital humanities research on historic menus.
Practitioners, critics, and popularizers of new methods of data-driven research treat the concept of “data cleaning” as integral to such work without remarking on the oddly domestic image it makes—as though a corn straw broom were to be incorporated, Rube-Goldberg-like, into the design of the Large Hadron Collider. In reality, “data cleaning” is often the most opaque part of data-intensive research.
A reference resource for those interested in using the open data from the New York Public Library's menu transcription project.
The New York Public Library Rare Book Division holds over 45,000 historical menus. About half of these were collected and curated by Frank E. Buttolph between 1900 and 1921. The menus date from the 1850s to the present and include menus from restaurant, railroad and steamship companies, as well as a range of other organizations.