The Carleton Dining Experience:
Food is a topic of major interest on campus today. From groups like FireBellies to Food Truth, food is a constant topic of conversation. Everybody eats! Carleton students today are familiar with the Bon Appetit dining experience in either Burton or the Language and Dining Center. But it wasn’t always this way. We were interested in the dining experience at Carleton during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In researching student dining experiences, we were able to connect to lived experiences of students in the past and gain a better understanding of Carleton’s early student culture. We did this through a website, which contains information on student experiences, as well as pictures, slideshows, and videos containing more information. Note that the map on the home page does not work in all versions of Chrome for some reason, but it always works in Safari. The link to our website can be found here. Have fun learning about the Carleton Dining Experience!
Your impressive final project was an effective combination of an interesting topic, strong research skills, and a well conceived multimedia presentation of your results. The themes you settled on provided a window into the foodways of Carleton in its first fifty years, both at the institutional level (e.g. Gridley, the Farm) and the personal (like the fantastic diaries of Lowe & Hughes). The information and images you found in the archives are great, and work pretty well in the website, although the Google sites theme and design are not quite as polished as they could have been. But the video documenaries are where the visuals really shine as you pan and zoom around them with “Ken Burns effect” and tell us what we’re looking at as we see them. Men versus Women was my favorite: such impressive voice talent making those quotations come alive! Overall, this was a success. Great work!