Digital Arcticism? Exploring Arctic connotations on Facebook

This article explores what happens if we let an algorithm search for the Arctic online. Drawing on a large dataset of posts from food actors on Facebook, we look at how the term of ‘Arctic’ is used on Facebook. We firstly explain the digital methods deployed in our work. We then present its outcome, a clustered and networked visualization of the ‘Arctic’ gastronomy conversation across the world. Our analysis shows how the Arctic is unsurprisingly connoted with to ice, but also to freshness. In the discussion, we show how these findings might take us in two directions. The first interprets our findings - the reproduction of stereotypes of the Arctic as cold and icy - as digital Arcticism. The other points to how local interventions can work to (re)value food imagery and how digital platforms can help Arctic food entrepreneurs with tapping into a global market by drawing on the global imagery displayed in our analysis.