ORCID

0000-0002-5333-742X

Keywords

technical communication, historical cookbooks, marginalia, digital archives, critical making

Abstract

This dissertation includes a traditional written portion, and a non-traditional digital humanities public history online digital archive project created through Omeka which showcases examples of hand-written recipes found within commercial cookbooks, called marginalia. The understanding of modern technical communication is affected by the perceived history of the field and currently, that history is biased toward non-domestic pursuits. The project explores what collecting, digitizing, and archiving examples of historical hand-written marginalia found within commercially printed American receipt books indicate about the presence, participatory nature, value, and contributions of domestic technical communications and their user-authors in the 19th century. The examples collected and presented within the digital portion of the project publicly support gender and feminist perspectives on definitions and histories of technical communication and feminist labor and work theories concerning the household. The method of gathering these examples involves attempting to bring the public in to contribute toward them. The American public are no strangers to creating and using digitized and born-digital documents, so I seek to involve people in a public-facing digital collection of historical examples of user-author-made domestic technical communication by asking them to add to the collection. It is an exercise in community critical making and public history; that is, learning and researching through the collaborative creation of things. Research and knowledge are not bound to words on paper created by one person alone, so I use images, digital spaces, and collaborative methods to help involve others in the re-imagining of what counts in historical recipes and domestic technical communication.

The digital portion of this dissertation can be found at: https://recipemarginalia.omeka.net

Completion Date

2025

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Raffel, Sara

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

Texts and Technology

Identifier

DP0029341

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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