Hello all!

Kinsey and I apologize for not being at class today, but we had finally managed to get together with the archivists and grill them about the books! Today was extremely productive and it’s nice to see our project taking a more tangible shape.

So, as far as data does, we found out some good information and some bad information. The good information is that all of the books that are unpacked and available for use are organized physically on the shelves in the archives. The categories include Southern Appalachian Community, North Carolina, Southern Appalachian General, and General Southern. On the other hand, this organization is not duplicated in any form in the digital records. In order to use the data, I could either pick a subset of books and search for all of them in the catalogue and organize the downloaded data, or I could just manually enter the relevant information from the subset of books into a spreadsheet. Option one is a lot less typing for me but involves a lot of searching and double checking while option two requires more typing, but less data configuring seeing as I would have entered everything myself. I went with option two. At the end of today I managed to go through about half the books in the Southern Appalachian Community section which seemed to me the most applicable sub-category of the cookbooks for us to use.

Kinsey and I together worked out a final recipes list for things that we would like to try and make based on their relevance and occurrence within the different cookbooks. Additionally, Kinsey did a lot of work concerning the site. She started putting together the page that connects us and our personal stories about food/recipes as well as writing up the justification pages for why we chose the cookbooks that we did from the larger collection.

As for the interviews, we are still waiting to here back from both Pam Allison and the local restaurants. Measures are being taken to follow up and we are doing our best to get this information as we think the personal input is part of the backbone of this larger-scale project.

Hopefully by this weekend we will have actual information up on our website for you to peruse!