I'm delighted to be collaborating with Katie Rawson on a next phase of work with the data from the New York Public Library's What's on the Menu? project. We'll be publishing the work we do together at a new site specifically devoted to the menus project — Curating Menus. Our first piece is an in-depth look at Frank E. Buttolph, the woman who created the library's menu collection. We wanted to understand the provenance of the menus data and, therefore, needed to know how the physical collection that underpins the digital data came to be. The more we researched Buttolph’s life, the more we found ourselves compelled to tell a better and fuller story about her and her work as a collector in the early twentieth century.
Read the piece at Curating Menus.