About

Iowa church and community cookbooks can reveal a lot about the historic demographics of a community, including showing the influence of different ethnic communities on local foodways, highlighting a shared food culture across Iowa communities, and revealing recipe traditions unique to specific communities. These examples are currently only discoverable by close reading; however, by creating a machine-readable corpus, these and many other examples can be revealed via distant reading and machine learning.

Using Python and the Natural Language Toolkit (and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) Python libraries), this project will examine a text corpus of community cookbooks from the Library’s Iowa Cookbook Collection in order to identify groupings of similar recipes that can reveal a shared food culture among Iowa communities as well as the evolution and adaptation of shared recipes over time and recipes that share ingredients and similar preparation but are called by different or ambiguous names. This analysis will also identify recipes that are unique to particular communities and that may highlight ethnic and cultural histories of those communities that are worthy of further study.