Tracing Culinary Discourse on Facebook: A Digital Methods Approach

In this chapter, I will show you how to map such discursive patterns with digital methods. In a dataset of 102M posts collected from 242K food-related Facebook pages worldwide, I track mentions of almost 700 chefs. I construct a ‘co-chef’ network (a network of chefs connected to each other if they are mentioned by the same pages) which I subject to a visual network analysis. I provide the network file so that you can follow my steps but it is of course also possible to take a different direction on your own (for example based on a smaller dataset, differently curated, or from a different medium). I also provide a series of intermediary visualizations annotated with my field notes which will hopefully make my thought process clearer.