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Spicing Academia: Food and Memories in Diasporic Feminine Spaces is a collaborative project between faculty research mentors Dr. Montserrat Fuente-Camacho and Dr. Mugdha Yeolekar and Student Fellows Yesenia Rivera Rayo and Haritha Govind. This project is two-fold, with a DEFcon Fellows digital humanities element and a faculty-led research element. The digital humanities element that I am a part of is currently in its prototype phase, involving creative brainstorming, using open-access storytelling tools, and curating visual representations of recipes. The project is an interdisciplinary venture to understand the affective relationships of food, feminine spaces, and global diversity. I am taking this project as an opportunity to build my digital storytelling skills, especially from a visual and aesthetic perspective.
Visual Storytelling
Visual Storytelling
Sometimes, photographs in the field do not come out as you want. There are technical glitches or circumstantial elements that can prevent you from capturing content with high quality. Through this project, I worked on artistic manipulations that can help share an image without losing the essence. This image here of Caldo de bola, an Ecuadorian dish, was cropped to isolate the bowl of food and draw the viewer's attention to the food specifically. I also added a mosaic and hand-painting filter to enhance the cohesiveness of the dish and downplay the blurry quality of the original image.
Kitchen Counter
Kitchen Counter
This image here was cropped to treat the kitchen counter as a central subject. I left in the toaster and kettle even though they were not used in the food prep to highlight the multi-purpose quality of a home-kitchen.
Bubbling Pot
Bubbling Pot
There is something real about a bubbling pot of soup where the trails of splashes are visible. This image was not meant to be a perfect, high-definition image of soup in an aesthetic and studio-ready pot. It was meant to reflect the mundane quality of everyday homely cooking.
All Hands In
All Hands In
This image was taken to represent the community aspect of cooking and sharing culture without including participants who were uncomfortable sharing their faces.
The Collaborative Process
The Collaborative Process
Collaboration is not inherently a passive process. It requires the active cooperation of different minds and a recognition that brainstorming and workshopping is continuous. Taking a project from an idea to a complete product can be unpredictable; however, rather than see this as a negative, working with Dr. Camacho, Dr. Yeoleka, and Yesenia has illustrated three things for me:
Working together as students and faculty allowed me to dissolve preconceived notions about experience-based incompatibility. Students and faculty can mutually enhance each other's academic journey.Â
Choosing the right tools is not always a straightforward process. There may be a back and forth about what the project is trying to convey and which tool can do it justice. Working within a team takes the burden of making this decision off one person. Becoming comfortable with the unpredictable is also arguably a positive byproduct of collaborative work.
Our interdisciplinary backgrounds and diverse skill sets make for a more robust understanding of what foods mean to people. As an anthropology graduate student, my mind naturally conceptualized food, memory, and diaspora from an anthropological perspective. Engaging with other disciplinary perspectives reminds me that there are many different ways of understanding food culture.
This is a link to the beginning of the prototype
Tradeoffs and Patience
Tradeoffs and Patience
Bounded creativity is sometimes necessary when time and bandwidth are not unlimited. In the real world, unlimited time is more of a myth than a reality, so what became important in the course of this project was weighing the pros and cons of each digital tool and each presentation idea to truly determine what was feasible within the allotted time. Keeping this in mind, building patience is a central takeaway for me. When reflecting on the element of patience that digital humanities projects cultivate, I believe that this is a reality of all academic work. While we think of ourselves as lone researchers in a bubble, my involvement in this project taught me that isolation doesn't necessarily bring out the best work. In extension, I recognized that the project would not be finished overnight, and it was fine to work on a prototype.
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