Established in 2012, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is an international group of interdisciplinary scholars working to crowd-source, transcribe, and tag English language recipe texts dating from c. 1550–1700. An experiment in citizen transcription and research-led pedagogy, it teaches students to read, transcribe, and encode in XML early modern manuscript recipe texts. Through their transcriptions, the students create open-access searchable editions of the texts and contribute to a collaborative research project conducted on campuses in the USA, the UK, and Germany. The collectively produced transcriptions are further tagged to create a database tracking recipe contributors, ailments and diseases, ingredients and materia medica, production methods and equipment, units of measurement, and seasonality. The resulting database will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of everyday science and medicine and its place within the early modern English social and cultural landscape.
The project is conducted in collaboration with the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project at the Folger Shakespeare Library and utilizes their crowd-source transcription platform Dromio. In 2015, 2016, and 2017, EMROC organized three 12-hour international transcribathons, involving over 300 international contributors to transcribe a number of texts including the recipe books of Rebeckah Winche (d. 1713) and Grace Castleton (1635–1667).
