Mapping Michigan Menus Led by Dani Willcutt
Mapping Michigan Menus began last summer with an exploration of available ways of “mapping” a food or drink menu, funded by a Digital Humanities Seed Grant. The project gained momentum and changed direction when I came into contact with the Crown Menu Collection in May. Consisting of thousands of menus from mostly Michigan, but also from Chicago, Maryland, Kentucky, Nevada, and California, the menu spans from 1965 to 2008.
All of the menus were collected by Dennis Cassidy, a co-owner of Crown Publishing in Dearborn, Michigan, which eventually became Crown Menus. Crown published many of the menus, but not all of them. Cassidy collected examples and souvenirs everywhere he went.
The collection is now in Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science at MSU, where we are organizing and, eventually, digitizing them. It is the largest collection of Michigan-based menus in existence (that we know of) and is a boon for scholars interested in foodways, restaurants, design, and advertising.
Food reveals a lot about a culture and menus in particular are meant to entice customers and to make people want to literally and viscerally consume something. Menus reveal what imagery and words evoke thoughts and memories of tastes, making customers want to eat and drink. Menus also reveal what people across space and time thought to be “good to eat” and to consume.
A future project with the menus is a sentiment analysis of language used on the menus. So far, a few of the menus have been digitized and live on an Omeka Classic site. This is where I have been experimenting with different ways of “mapping” a menu by using available Omeka Classic plugins like Universal Viewer and Annotation.
The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the December 4, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
