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Différance

Crab salad

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Building an Archive There is only one small problem, then, to overcome. As a humanist, I've both trained myself and been trained to attend to words, to draw meaning from them, to dilate and expand that meaning, to situate it historically. I've been taught always to attend to the material form on which those words are transmitted, too: to the ways paper and print might add to or detract from meaning, to what physical books can tell me about the life of the work after it was printed. Towards this end, I've always used an archive of some sort. Often that archive has been the novel itself, an archive formed of the author's words, which assembles her thoughts and feelings about a story. Sometimes it is an archive of novels, such as that found in the university's rare book room. In a few projects, it has been an archive of government publications and pricing charts. Archives make you spoiled, though: they're neat little packages that someone else assembled in such a way that all you have to do is unpack them. (We never do seem to think enough about how those archives come to be, who built them, and what their motivations were, I think.)

My grandmother, though, doesn't exist in a university library or neatly bound novel. In truth, she has left behind very little material at all: I have two pictures; a yearbook; a wooden box full of recipes written mostly on index cards; some online newspaper mentions, early in her life. The recipes, then, represent the largest single thing from which I can begin to explicate that difference between my grandmother and I. They're packaged neatly in a small, lidded, cedar box with a pair of neat brass hinges punched into the wood and a stained graphic on top of women in various stages of cooking with the word Recipes writ large. On the front are emblazoned the words "Atlantic City, N.J."—a seemingly throwaway piece of materiality, except that it suggests (though does not prove) that the recipe collection was began before 1955. After 1955, my grandparents would have began vacationing in Ocean City, Maryland, rather than Atlantic City, New Jersey, as the newly constructed Chesapeake Bay Bridge shortened the trip to OCMD considerably. More often than not, the lid of the collection sits ajar, owing to the overflow of its contents. Inside is a multi-generational collection of recipes from my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and even from a very young me. The box also contains some recipes sourced, presumably, from friends—my grandmother's? my mom's?—sometimes just attributed to those friends, sometimes written by them on specially made cards designed for sharing, as with the recipe for Crab Salad above. Mostly these recipes are written on index cards in blue ink. There are, all told, 141 of them.

Arguably this box was already an archive of sorts, one which spanned decades and hundreds of miles. But making sense of it required some measure of curation. I decided to do this online, mostly because I wanted what's left of my family to have easy access to it, but also because I wanted the recipes to exist somewhere else, in some other form, lest something happen to the box and they be lost forever. (We think the digital is permanent, after all, and a safe place to backup valuable memories...at the same time that we think it troublingly fleeting and ephemeral. Quite a few scholars talk about this: Matthew Kirschenbaum is my favorite, and he's pretty accessible.) I also thought there might be some value in the collection for other scholars looking at recipes, especially those coming from the Depression era and its pupils. Lastly, since these recipes would only otherwise be available in a small wooden box on my desk, I figured that any project I undertook with them would require representation of some sort. Why not simply represent them all?

The digital also offered an enticing opportunity for something like "distant reading," the term we use for when we want to look at a body of literature containing multiple works in aggregate as data (as opposed to the kind of "close reading" most of us learned to do in high school, where we looked, granularly, at passages or even single words from a passage or book). Distant reading, I hoped, would help me to better see the kind of cook my grandmother was outside of the general "feel" that I get from looking through her recipes. For instance, I know she wasn't much into fresh vegetables, and more often than not her recipes call for ground beef than any other kind of meat (though she shows a far greater familiarity with cuts of meat than I have). But these feel like impressions more than facts. Distant reading seemed like a chance to solidify them in the cold, hard realm of data.

I'm not sure, towards that end, how successful I've been. Scalar gave me the opportunity to "tag" recipes as a way to show their commonalities—for instance, I've grouped all the recipes that contain cream cheese together under a single tag—but it's not able to tell me much about how those tags interact outside of gimmicky network graphics. For instance, I can't just throw in some code to show you all the recipes that my grandmother wrote which contain cream cheese, or even what percentage of the archive her recipes represent. Furthermore, my own tagging practices create a kind of bias in the analysis. I became convinced early on that my grandmother used sauerkraut in everything, so I created a sauerkraut tag. As it turns out, this tag wasn't really used all that often. A tag I didn't create, however—rice and pasta—would have found far more utility. Still, these were instructive experiences, for a few reasons: first, for thinking about my own biases; second, for what distant reading they allow (it's useful to know that sauerkraut wasn't really a big deal); and lastly, for thinking, again, about how little I think about the implicit biases of archive creators in my own use of archives.

But enough of all that: I'll explore it all in more depth in the individual analyses, accessible below. If you're just here for the recipes, that's fine, too. Feel free to skip on ahead!