About

Computers Reading Cookbooks is a collections-as-data project examining a selection of community cookbooks from the Library’s Iowa Cookbook Collection. Using Python and natural language processing tools, this project analyzes the cookbook corpus to identify shared food traditions, trace how dishes evolve over time, and identify both common and culturally distinct recipes across Iowa communities.

The Iowa Community Cookbook Corpus is a text datast of 200 OCR’d cookbooks published by Iowa community organizations from 1896-2009. The digitized cookbooks are available for browsing in the ISU Library’s Cookbook Digital Collection. The corpus files will be made available at a later date.

This project is led by Erin Ridnour, digital scholarship librarian, Digital Scholarship and Initiatives, Iowa State University Library.