Ragù. Preserving Italian Cookbooks in a Sustainable Crowdsourced Digital Collection
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/21113Keywords:
cultiral heritage preservation, Crowdsourcing, data management, digital storytellingAbstract
Recipes of popular origin and handwritten cookbooks have often been overlooked by scholars, due to the difficulties derived from 1) collecting and organising a representative - let alone complete - set of documents, 2) contextualising scattered sources in a broader historical context and communicate their value to a broad audience, and 3) costs such a collection campaign would require. Nonetheless, having such collections available for qualitative and quantitative analysis could highlight peculiarities of the culinary history of a place, as well as considerations on its material history. Ragù is a pilot project that tries to fill in this gap by crowdsourcing and digitising a collection of cookbooks belonging to the Italian traditional cuisine, particularly from Emilia Romagna, and making it accessible via a digital platform for exploration and analysis. The digital project here aims at contributing to two research lines: a) to identify agile methods for publishing data in a low-cost crowdsourcing project, and b) to devise an effective storytelling journey to present the Ragù project.
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