À la Carte: Turning Historical Menu into Menu Network

Abstract

Confronted with the digitization of historical menus and motivated by the potentially valuable insights into history, researchers have recently focused on the content analysis of historical menus. Inspired by previous research, our objective is to reassemble and interpret historical menu network. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive historical menu network model, which integrates temporal, geographical, economic, and textual information into a graph representation. We conduct experiments on the basis of the menu collection of New York Public Library to uncover the interesting structures and patterns embedded in the network.