Preserving Culinary Traditions. A Crowdsourced Digital Collection of Cookbooks

TL;DR

The paper presents Ragù, a digital platform that crowdsources and digitizes Italian traditional cookbooks to preserve culinary heritage and explore low-cost data publishing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel crowdsourcing approach for digitizing and sharing traditional cookbooks, focusing on agile data publication and storytelling.

Findings

Successful collection of Italian cookbooks

Effective digital platform for cultural preservation

Insights into low-cost crowdsourcing methods

Abstract

Recipes of popular origin and handwritten cookbooks are often overlooked by scholars. Rag\`u is a pilot project that tries to fill in this gap by gathering and digitising a collection of cookbooks belonging to the Italian traditional cuisine, and making it accessible via a digital platform. The project 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 for the Rag\`u project.