Lansing’s Culinary Heritage Trail

My Project for this year is tentatively named the Lansing Culinary Heritage Trail and it will be a straightforward web map based digital heritage trail. The project concept is relatively simple, but the application is more advanced than the Twine-based project I built as a fellow in 2019-2020. A major challenge to the project is working out how to integrate the digital and physical worlds in a meaningful way that tells stories of Lansing’s restaurants in the mid-to late-twentieth century. The locations are restaurants, pubs, or stores that provided food, drinks, and entertainment to Lansing and its surrounding areas. These locations have become important within public and local memory. The stories of the restaurants include the lives of workers, customers, and the communities that built up around establishments like Harry’s Place, Stober’s, Sneakers, Gregory’s, and Jim’s Tiffany. It will be a space for my dissertation research to live but with a public focus. So far, I have some ideas regarding branding and how to design the logo. I am creating the data sheets containing all information I will need of the restaurants, including coordinates, information for pop-ups, and links to photographs. I am still perusing JavaScript libraries and have a rough sketch of what the final product will look like. I could say more about features, etc… but I am still working all of that out. I have an idea of how I want the project to look and I am working on creating an appropriate logo. There is a lot more to work out for this project and certainly a lot more to build, but I am looking forward to the experience of building a space for my dissertation research to live outside of the written dissertation.