Topic: 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 are interested in the dining experience at Carleton during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In researching student dining experiences, we hope to connect to lived experiences of students in the past and gain a better understanding of Carleton’s early student culture.

Question: What was the student dining experience like on Carleton College’s campus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

In so doing, we also hope to explore the following secondary questions: what kind of restaurant options were available to students in Northfield and how often were they used? Were there dress codes in the dining halls? What was the role of the Carleton dairy in providing food to students? What kinds of special meals were provided for students? Who supplied the majority of Carleton’s food supplies? How was the food served (family style, waiters, etc.)?

Objectives: We hope to learn more about Carleton’s dining history and food production in Northfield. We also aim to improve our proficiency in JavaScript, XML, and CSS. We will work to develop our film skills, particularly composition and editing. Finally, we will improve our website design skills.

Materials: We will use any of the following that we can find: photographs, contracts for food suppliers, archival material from the surrounding farms and dairies, restaurants in Northfield, maps, floor plans, yearbooks, scrapbooks, menus, and oral histories. We will find most of this information using Carleton’s archives, the Northfield Historical Society, and the Minnesota Historical Society.

Tools and Techniques for material storage: We will use tables and files in Google docs spreadsheets to keep track of images and sources and their metadata. We may also utilize the Collab folders if necessary.

Analyses and Transformations: We will compile short essays on particular aspects of dining at Carleton. For example, we will determine whether or not women’s and men’s dining experiences were the same. We will also look at social aspects of dining such as table seating. We hope to transform our images into a light box presentation. We also anticipate scanning and uploading images and scrapbooks from the Archives.

Final Product: We will produce a documentary-style video with a companionship website. The video will focus on dining at Carleton and will be in the same vein as Ken Burns’ PBS documentaries. As such, we will present primary source material such as images and manuscripts. We are also hoping to find oral histories to supplement our visual material. However, we may also utilize narrations of reminiscences from scrapbooks or the Carletonian. Our website will host the video but will be so much more! The website will have high-quality images shown in the video for users to access as well as supplementary information. We will have sections that go more in-depth than the video, such as a special feature on Carleton’s dairy farm. We will also have a small interactive map of Carleton’s dining halls with information for the user about where things were located and interior images. We may also employ an interactive timeline, depending on the materials we are able to locate. We might also integrate a timeline into the map.

Questions: Some questions we still have about our final project: Where are we hosting the website? We considered WordPress but we would like to be able to use our own plug-ins. We also thought about Omeka but we have some reservations about the flexibility of the platform. We also considered our student websites hosted on Carleton’s network, but those are also not particularly flexible.

Possible Extensions: The dining experience in Northfield. This could also include a mapping component. The dining experience today as compared to the dining experience at the beginning of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. We could do a side-by-side comparison of a meal today and a meal in the past.

Proposed Timeline:
5th Week– Gather sources and images and sort them, figure out where to host website, narrow research questions
6th Week– Build skeleton of website, identify sources for video
7th Week– Begin production of film, start writing content essays
8th Week– Continue production of film, start narration, add images to website
9th Week– Edit film, make interactive map, publish, organize websites
10th Week– Present

Model DH Projects: We are hoping to model our website on companion websites for documentary films such as this one for Ken Burns’ The West. Of course our website will look a little better and be more user friendly, as this site was produced in 2001. We may also utilize websites such as this one hosted on Omeka for its presentation of primary source materials.