DH101 FINAL PROJECT
THE CHRONICLES OF BLUE POINT OYSTERS
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE TRENDS OF BLUE POINT OYSTERS FROM 1870-1970
ALLY CHOU
Ally is a third year Art History major studying at UCLA, minoring in Digital Humanities. She has a passion for food, and has taken courses on environmental science, focusing on the impact of man on nature. She hopes to make more people aware of their actions’ effect on the environment on the long run. Her role in the group project was a Project Manager, as well as the Website Specialist who made this website. She was also involved in creating the visualizations such as the timeline and the “Cooked or Raw?” visualization.
ATHENA DANG
Athena Dang is a senior communications major at UCLA, and she often ponders the idea of using oyster filtration to make Los Angeles tap water cleaner and taste better. Her job in the oyster project was to track the amount of Blue Point oysters consumed in New York over time. She also gathered data from the New York Water quality archive to juxtapose to the amount of Blue Points being sold on the market. Her primary role involved data extraction by using Python script.
MIKE ZHANG
Mike Zhang is a third-year student majoring in Communications and History at UCLA. Grown up in Szechuan, the most essential Giant Panda sanctuary in the world, he became interested in environmental issues and began to explore the environmental problems that impacted on the population of oysters. For this project, as the content specialist, he exploited various visualization tools including Tableau, Google Fusion Tables, and Palladio to create the timeline, and maps.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
SOURCES
PROCESSING
PRESENTATION
This project was kickstarted with the incentives of completing the DH101 Final Project. We were given a set of data and chose to investigate oysters on menus because that was what we found the most interesting.
Our sources are based on the New York Public Library’s menu collection. Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), who began to collect menus on the Library's behalf in 1900, added more than 25,000 menus to the collection, before leaving the Library in 1924. Currently, the collection now contains approximately 45,000 items, about quarter of which have so far been digitized and made available in the NYPL Digital Gallery. The menu collection offers comprehensive coverage of dishes, menus, and restaurants from the 19th century to the 21st century.
Trevor Munoz (2013) gave us an idea of what the NYPL menu dataset was like, and what we were dealing with. It is found that the comma-separated value files are the results of human computation that directly recounted “the string of characters in the image exactly as it appears”. Therefore, many of the values under the ‘name’ column in the dish.csv are not names of the dishes at all -- often ingredients in fact. This was one of the limitations we were aware of prior to dealing with the data.
After acquiring our data, we consulted readings and advisors to find out what to do next. Scott Weingart’s blog (2018) on “Question and Data Driven history” recommended the technique of scalable reading, or interpretive reading. With this, we challenged our data set by asking questions like what type of record it was, what its value was, and how much information we are dealing with. We also followed Weingart’s advice on contextualizing our information. We found that to do this, comparing our data within itself and externally would be useful -- which is what we did in comparing oysters to other shellfish, and aligning it with sociocultural and political events that you will see in the following pages.
Additionally, with the help of our Teaching Assistant Craig, we were able to extract the data only about Blue Point Oysters from the menu collection. Subsequently, the oyster data were ordered by time and subsequently used for mapping.
With the digital platform empowered by Wix, we were able to organize all of our visualizations and explanations along with the splitting of our topic into sections. The sections include “Aims, Timeline, Environmental Statistics, Maps, Data Range, and About (Data Critique and Bibliography).” The timeline offers a comprehensive overview of most significant events and issues related to oysters (in the New York area). With more detailed visualizations of the environmental issues along the years, the section about the Environmental Statistics further expanded on the information indicated by the timeline. The two maps were also created to compare the changes that happened to the oyster population/their appearances on the menus in different time periods. In terms of mapping presentation, we were inspired by David Turnbull’s collection of map exhibits that gave us an idea of the content we would like to present through maps that are appropriate to help viewers understand our data from a geographical perspective (Turnbull, 2008).
Acknowledgements: Huge thanks to Craig Messner for helping our project by providing guidance and a python script for one of our visualizations.
INTRODUCTION TO OUR AIMS
During the first and second industrial revolution in New York City, pollution was at an all time high for all Manhatteners. This was good news for the citizens of The Big Apple. Culture, food, music was booming during the late 1800’s to early 1920’s. The consumption of the plentiful oyster was a staple for New York food culture. Yet after the second industrial revolution in 1870 came the downfall of this shellfish tradition. From 1870 and beyond, came years and years of toxic dumping from oil refineries, dog food factories, and fertilizer runoff. The future of the keystone oyster was sealed. Their numbers eventually declined until New York Harbor was at one point considered an ecological wasteland for 50 years. It was not until the 1972’s that the Clean Water Act was introduced that clean up efforts were introduced.
The area our team is interested in is the period in between the 1870’s to 1970’s. We are interested in tracking the consumption of, particularly, Blue Point oysters on menus in New York City. Though New York Harbor contains a diversity of shellfish, we chose the Blue Points because it was a classic dish for its time that was local to New York and a fine exemplar for its species. We want to know: Did oysters started disappearing from New York menus between this time? Was the preparation of oysters changed? If oysters did decrease, what time had the lowest amount of consumption and what were the key factors for this change? Surely, if New Yorkers lose their most convenient and prestiged source of shellfish to pollution, we should see an overall decrease in the number of menus serving it. Our sources range from research papers, and publications documenting the culture surrounding oysters in New York. The research also deals in the general population count of oysters in New York Harbor over time. This data is relevant to our argument because we are tracing the rise and fall of oyster consumption overtime. These public record-based research articles are perfect for plotting out the time from of the rise and fall and the fluctuation for oysters from New York menus. In addition, the eBooks we found help set the stage for the culture before the pollution of New York Harbor. Using this information, we are able to compare and contrast the amount of restaurants then to the oyster establishments today. From all the gathered data, we will be investigating this topic of oysters decline from a political, geographical, statistical, scientific and temporal perspective through different types of visualizations.
WHAT HAS PAST LITERATURE SAID ABOUT THIS?
The topic on oysters in New York has been well researched over the years because of its popularity in the area and the fluctuation of oyster frequencies during the 1870s to the 1970s, which was a noticeable change for New Yorkers — who loved oysters — in that time. Most of the research we have found claims that the New York harbor was deteriorating in ecological health during the mentioned period due to the second industrial revolution that led to many pollutants entering the water, and subsequently caused the decline of oyster populations. In this project, examine whether this environmental or political impacts were reflected in the consumption of oysters in New York.
From David Franz’s investigation of mollusks in the Lower New York Harbor, it was found that sewage outfalls, over exploitation of oysters, over-harvesting and the consequences of population growth in New York, were the primary factors in the decline of oysters during the late 1800s. The article’s scientific perspective on pollution’s impact on oyster density also correlates with the conclusions of another article by Andrew Hurley. Hurley explains how wastelands were increasing in New York City from 1870-1900, claiming that petroleum refineries were the biggest contributors to New York’s ecological wastelands. Even though these wastelands exist on the terrain, secondary factors such as unregulated toxic runoff, dumping waste into the New York Bay (which were the popular areas for oyster growth) and more, significantly decreased the oyster population during that time. This is further supported by John Waldman’s research questions on his article “Heartbeats in Muck”, which focuses on the abundance of oysters prior to the 1880s, supporting our hypothesis — and that of the aforementioned researchers’ — that there was a sharp decline starting from the 1870s to the 1910s. All this data from preexisting research serves as plenty of evidence supporting reasons why oysters suddenly declined in frequency from menus provided by the NYPL starting from 1870s to 1910s. The articles that we have found all generally agree with each other and we did not find any contradicting evidence.
However the questions that still exist include whether the decline of oysters were purely attributed to ecological factors caused by industrialization or if other factors were involved in this decline. To what degree, for instance, was the decline be attributed to anthropological causes, bureaucratic flaws, or simply ecological shifts? In order to relate this back to our menu dataset, we will also consider how the demand for oysters in restaurants were altered (as seen from the menus), or compensated by exports from other areas of the country. Did factors to do with outsourcing exist and if so, what was its role in moderating the decline of oysters on New York menus? Until now, there have not been any research linking quantitative data on oyster decline of the second industrial revolution, to the restaurant/culinary scene and how these declines impacted New Yorker’s food norms and intakes. Hence, one of the goals for our final project will be to enlighten audiences on the cultural aspects of the oyster decline and how it affected what people ate, which would bring this environmental issue down to a more relatable and relevant level.
WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE?
Our project is designed to shed a new light on oysters’ historical role in the ecological history and culinary culture, which will offer more insight on the environmental and social contexts during the late 19th, to the latter half of 20th century New York. Combining various types of visualizations, such as maps, charts, and graphs, our project highlights the decline of the oyster population from the 1870s to 1970s, to provide a more visually informative representation of our research findings.
As a result, our project allows our audience to derive the correlational relationships between causes and problems as indicated by our final research findings. The visualizations and annotations will aim to highlight the connections among environmental issues caused by industrialization, over-consumption of oysters as food, the decline of oyster population, and the subsequent disappearance of oysters on the menus of New York restaurants. By making those connections more visible, we hope to show the audience a big picture of the oyster supply chain and its impacts on the natural environment of New York, as well as whether these consequences affected the urban/culinary culture of the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This project is also designed to encourage our audience to pay more attention to the human factors in changing the natural environment whether it was for the better or worse. By focusing on oysters, we want to remind them of the negative effects produced by the over-consumption of a single type of species. In other words, most people tend to take food supplies for granted and often neglect the original resources of their food, which are often extracted from nature. However, the truth is that the negative impacts of over-consuming one specific creature can be almost disastrous to its natural habitat and even the entire ecosystem. Thus, we will be highlighting the case of oysters as an illustrative example, to encourage audiences to dig deeper into environmental issues, and to understand this relevant information on the importance of environmental protection.
CONTACT US
University of California, Los Angeles
Contact us for questions or more information about our project!