Ragù. Preserving Italian Cookbooks in a Sustainable Crowdsourced Digital Collection

Recipes of popular origin and handwritten cookbooks have often been overlooked by scholars, due to the difficulties derived from 1) collecting and organising a representative – let alone complete – set of documents, 2) contextualising scattered sources in a broader historical context and communicate their value to a broad audience, and 3) costs such a collection campaign would require. Nonetheless, having such collections available for qualitative and quantitative analysis could highlight peculiarities of the culinary history of a place, as well as considerations on its material history. Ragù is a pilot project that tries to fill in this gap by crowdsourcing and digitising a collection of cookbooks belonging to the Italian traditional cuisine, particularly from Emilia-Romagna, and making it accessible via a digital platform for exploration and analysis. The digital project here aims at contributing to two research lines: a) to identify agile methods for publishing data in a low-cost crowdsourcing project, and b) to devise an effective storytelling journey to present the Ragù project.