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Cooking traditions, whether they are regional or in a larger context, are one of the most distinguishable items of European culture and an important part of European identities. But how did they become to what we know them now? How did they develop and what were their influences? During the last decades, research arrived at two important conclusions on these questions. Firstly, there are no quantitative studies on the origin and formation of regional cuisines in Europe. Secondly, manuscripts containing thousands of cookery recipes first appeared in the Middle Ages, which can be consequently regarded as the birth of modern European cuisines. On the European continent Latin, Middle French and Early New High German recipes provide the majority of culinary transmission. The project is preparing the cooking recipe transmission of France and the German speaking countries, which sums up to more than 80 manuscripts and about 8000 recipes, for the analysis of their origin, their relation, and their migration through Europe. The comparison of French and German food history is especially suited for this task as France always had a culturally formative influence on German speaking peoples.
Cooking recipes are culturally charged transient texts, which are best diachronically and spatially analyzed by strongly relying on digital humanities methods. However, understanding these recipes, their context and their transmission is not an easy process. The technical terms that describe ingredients, utensils, procedures, and customs of the time are a challenge even for history scholars who specialize on the topic. Thus, the texts need not only be transcribed and edited but also semantically enriched so that further analysis like machine aided comparison of ingredients or cooking processes can add to standardized philological research like the collation. The base of our data will be customized TEI/XML documents with a schema aiming at facilitating the semantic annotation of cooking recipes in general.
The core of our digital research strategy is the Semantic Web and the idea of Linked Open Data. We are in the comfortable position within the Humanities that we are mainly dealing with food ingredients i.e. animals, plants and fungi, all fields of research that are provided with a sophisticated amount of already established ontologies and Linked Data
For an overview of ontologies covering these topics see
http://www.ontobee.org/,
http://aims.fao.org/,
https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/,
https://agclass.nal.usda.gov/about.shtml,
http://zbw.eu/stw/version/latest/thsys/70498/about.de.html all of which are connected to the Linked Open Date Cloud by proving its data in one or more serializations of OWL and/or RDF(S).
http://medieval-plants.org https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Reconciliation-Service-API http://openrefine.org/
Once the entities of each recipe are equipped with concepts, the project’s analysis can reveal concurring or deviating eating habits, text migration as well as the influence of neighboring countries on their respective cuisine. The vast implementation of ontologies in the natural sciences allows us to establish connections from historical eating habits to modern concepts of food and generate new knowledge for the domain of food history. The research data will also be the basis for spatial and temporal visualization and statistical evaluation. The storage, analysis and dissemination of the project’s data is handled by the data repository GAMS (Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management) developed by the Austrian Centre for Information Modelling in Graz.
http://gams.uni-graz.at/