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  • Becoming Visible:Recipes in the Making
  • Rebecca Laroche (bio), Elaine Leong (bio), Jennifer Munroe (bio), Hillary M. Nunn (bio), Lisa Smith (bio), and Amy L. Tigner (bio)

An interdisciplinary project that encompasses digital humanities, collaborative research, and book history, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) has found itself breaking methodological ground in several respects. Dedicated to a collaborative methodology, a largely female subject area, and the goals of open access, EMROC has discovered many challenges and rewards. The collective offers its experiences and vision as a means of transforming future research endeavors in sustainable and exciting ways through cross-campus exchanges and Citizen Humanities initiatives.

In 2012, EMROC began to render early modern manuscript recipe books (1500–1800) accessible and full-text searchable. Our Steering Committee is international and interdisciplinary in its scope, comprised of literary scholars from across the United States (Rebecca Laroche, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Jennifer Munroe, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Hillary Nunn, University of Akron; and Amy L. Tigner, University of Texas, Arlington) and historians from Europe (Lisa Smith, University of Essex, and Elaine Leong, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science). Using the Dromio transcription platform developed by the Folger Shakespeare Library,1 EMROC has generated transcriptions in upwards of thirty books in the past five years, with twenty now complete and to be housed in the Folger's EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online) database.2 More importantly, we have facilitated the process of transcription [End Page 133] in an international community and increased general interest in making these rich and complex texts more visible and accessible.

Handwritten household recipe collections were one of the most widespread genres of women's writing in early modern England, as historians and literary scholars have noted.3 Often compiled by families across generations and detailing how to make diverse medicines and foods, as well as how to conduct various tasks of housework, these texts are ideal sources for the study of quotidian life and for the exploration of the intellectual worlds of their creators. Hundreds of such books survive in libraries and archives across the UK and North America, and several institutions have begun large scale digitization efforts, making many online reproductions available to experienced researchers.4 However, automated text recognition of handwritten documents cannot yet create accurate digital renderings of these manuscripts, meaning these texts remain accessible only to those trained in paleography.5 In collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library, EMROC is creating a corpus of encoded, full-text searchable transcriptions with the potential for additional markup and tagging. The creation of this large corpus opens new research possibilities via digital methods, as well as brings these fascinating sources to wider audiences.

Feminist and collaborative from its inception, EMROC supports new and established scholars as they take on the challenges inherent to transcribing, coding, vetting, and contextualizing recipe materials. For us, undergraduate and [End Page 134] postgraduate classrooms can (and should) become sites of inherently feminist pedagogy, spaces of knowledge creation, and homes for academic communities of practice. Thus, collaboration with our students is central to our work.6 As such, our approach moves away from a traditional model of an individual's publication and funding, and insists that we learn from each other in a way that challenges elite models of knowledge creation. Our feminist pedagogy emphasizes the importance of flattened hierarchies, the role of personal experience and engagement, and the forging of links between the classroom and the external world.7

To this end, EMROC generates its transcriptions both through crowd-sourcing, especially among students in our classes, and an established membership of regular and experienced transcribers; in this respect, our project engages both our students and the public at large, calling on impulses associated with the Citizen Humanities movements. Citizen Humanities is a collaboration between professionals and the general public to collect and analyze data on human heritage.8 Analyses of crowdsourcing tend to focus on participants' engagement, but they have not considered the relationship between teaching and public engagement.9 Considering public engagement, Jennifer Sandlin and others recently asked whether pedagogy, as practiced and theorized in higher education, is applicable to interactions with the public.10 Pedagogy as...

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