Three Temporal Arcs in the Hobby of Gourmet Cooking
One chapter of my dissertation discussed how gourmet cooking unfolds in time and the impact on information behavior. This idea was developed into a poster and a paper; the poster version is summarized below.
Abstract
A scientific ethnography was conducted to explore information phenomena in the hobby of gourmet cooking. This (now-online) poster presents results that pertain to the relationship between time and information behavior in that hobby. Gourmet cooks undergo three temporal arcs: linked streams of experience through different periods of time. They pursue a long-running hobby career (Stebbins, 2001) that evolves over many years or an entire life. For shorter periods, they pursue culinary subjects to deepen ability and knowledge. Finally, they perform numerous hands-on cooking episodes that generate an edible outcome. Temporally unpacking the hobby reveals three important insights about information behavior: 1.) Each arc serves as a distinct context for different information behaviors; 2.) Any moment in the hobby pierces all three arcs, and therefore information behaviors likely interact in complex ways; and 3.) Holistic information research (in any domain, not just hobbies) should extend beyond short term time frames to consider all temporal arcs.
Research Method
This scientific ethnography (Sandstrom & Sandstrom, 1995) balances the personal accounts of gourmet hobby cooks with objective measures of their home-based culinary information collections. Twenty fieldwork outings were conducted in the homes of gourmet cooks in Boston and Los Angeles. Informants were encountered at public culinary events and recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Three data gathering techniques were used in the home of each cook: 1.) a semi-structured interview explored the life-context of the hobby, its routines, and informational elements. Then, the cook led a 2.) narrated tour of their home, describing information resources in their natural setting. The environment and its information artifacts were documented through a photographic inventory. After the tour, the floor plan was 3.) diagrammed, marking concentrations of information to capture their distribution in the site. The interview and cook's tour commentary were transcribed; photographs and diagrams were captioned. Grounded theory analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) was applied to all textual data and a visual analysis process was performed on the Images (Collier & Collier, 1986). Results will be presented as a field-note centered ethnography.
The Career Arc
A defining quality of serious leisure is that participants engage in a hobby career, a path of experience that may last years, decades, or a lifetime (Stebbins, 2001, p. 10). Other types of free time activity such as casual leisure or project-based leisure do not entail the same sustained commitment, cumulation, or sense of trajectory. The idea of a career within a hobby takes some getting used to, because of its association with work realms. But free of any context, the essence of a career is its continuity, high and low points, and resulting sense of advancement. The 20 gourmet cooks in the study had no problem telling the story of their career. It usually began in childhood with the early stirring of a culinary imagination, went through phases of experimentation and refinement, and then flourished at its heyday. Stebbins proposes that the hobby career has five stages, though the boundaries are imprecise: beginning, development, establishment, maintenance, and decline, shown above.
This arc forms the context for the information behavior of knowledge acquisition or learning. Cooks start the hobby career without special expertise and through study and hands-on experience advance to high levels of culinary skill and understanding. My research suggests that the most learning intensive stage is early in the career, and in later stages cooks tend to coast and sometimes turn their attention to teaching and informal consulting. The various states of knowledge along the career path have important implications for LIS, too extensive to detail here. (For instance, cooks in each of the five stages of the hobby career would likely engage information systems differently.)
The career arc is also the appropriate temporal home for information collecting. Over years or decades most gourmet cooks gather and maintain cookbooks, recipes, and a other culinary genres. Items are added to the collection for use at some later point in the career. Certain special resources are saved for the anticipated decline, when they will be passed on to children or grandchildren. Understanding the nature and use of personal information collections requires a long view of this arc.
This arc forms the context for the information behavior of knowledge acquisition or learning. Cooks start the hobby career without special expertise and through study and hands-on experience advance to high levels of culinary skill and understanding. My research suggests that the most learning intensive stage is early in the career, and in later stages cooks tend to coast and sometimes turn their attention to teaching and informal consulting. The various states of knowledge along the career path have important implications for LIS, too extensive to detail here. (For instance, cooks in each of the five stages of the hobby career would likely engage information systems differently.)
The career arc is also the appropriate temporal home for information collecting. Over years or decades most gourmet cooks gather and maintain cookbooks, recipes, and a other culinary genres. Items are added to the collection for use at some later point in the career. Certain special resources are saved for the anticipated decline, when they will be passed on to children or grandchildren. Understanding the nature and use of personal information collections requires a long view of this arc.
The Subject Arc
It is typical for the hobbyist to concentrate attention on one substantive area of cooking and invest weeks, months, or years deepening knowledge and ability in that limited realm. Here, these focused efforts are called subjects and are topical in nature and also temporal because they are pursued for a duration. Against the longer arc of the hobby cooking career, subjects may be seen as extended projects that temporarily occupy the foreground. Several subjects are shown above as examples (Thai, barbecue, French...) though they vary widely per cook based upon personal interests and cannot be predicted.
The cook's engagement with subjects can be cast as a form of classification, although they are likely unaware of it in an LIS sense. Kwasnik states, "classification is the meaningful clustering of experience" that enables the organization or acquisition of knowledge (1999, p. 24); gourmet cooks perform the latter variety to obtain new knowledge.
More specifically, when the hobbyist focuses on a subject, they perform two classificatory acts. First, they identify a bounded area within the vast culinary universe. Over time they come to see each as a node in a network or system. Second, after selecting and committing to a subject, they explore its facets (illustrated below). In their own words, hobbyists describe this as seeing cuisine subjects, "from a number of angles, such as its traditional recipes, ingredients, techniques, seasonal uses...each cuisine has a spectrum." The resulting familiarity hobbyists gain with subject structure serves as a springboard, and model, for engaging new subjects.
Importantly, every culinary subject has a distinct information environment with its own discourse, genres, and other information phenomena. To illustrate, French cuisine is supported by a rich documentary realm of texts and magazines; whereas other cuisines, such as Thai or Iranian, are more reliant on an oral tradition. As the cooks advance into and through subjects they gain experience in different sorts of culinary information landscapes.
For the gourmet cook subjects are topical, temporal, mid-range phenomena that bring focus, structure, and dynamism to the hobby. This departs from the traditional sense of subjects as, "the thought contents of a document" (Satija, 2000, p. 223) to a more dynamic conception as organized activity in the context of a specific domain.
The cook's engagement with subjects can be cast as a form of classification, although they are likely unaware of it in an LIS sense. Kwasnik states, "classification is the meaningful clustering of experience" that enables the organization or acquisition of knowledge (1999, p. 24); gourmet cooks perform the latter variety to obtain new knowledge.
More specifically, when the hobbyist focuses on a subject, they perform two classificatory acts. First, they identify a bounded area within the vast culinary universe. Over time they come to see each as a node in a network or system. Second, after selecting and committing to a subject, they explore its facets (illustrated below). In their own words, hobbyists describe this as seeing cuisine subjects, "from a number of angles, such as its traditional recipes, ingredients, techniques, seasonal uses...each cuisine has a spectrum." The resulting familiarity hobbyists gain with subject structure serves as a springboard, and model, for engaging new subjects.
Importantly, every culinary subject has a distinct information environment with its own discourse, genres, and other information phenomena. To illustrate, French cuisine is supported by a rich documentary realm of texts and magazines; whereas other cuisines, such as Thai or Iranian, are more reliant on an oral tradition. As the cooks advance into and through subjects they gain experience in different sorts of culinary information landscapes.
For the gourmet cook subjects are topical, temporal, mid-range phenomena that bring focus, structure, and dynamism to the hobby. This departs from the traditional sense of subjects as, "the thought contents of a document" (Satija, 2000, p. 223) to a more dynamic conception as organized activity in the context of a specific domain.
The Episode Arc
An episode is a cooking project that generates an edible outcome as an individual item or meal. Episodes can last just a few minutes for a simple preparation or may require significant advanced work lasting several days. This is the real-time hands-on level of the hobby that is repeated over and over again. Through the course of the hobby caree,r the gourmet cook executes hundreds or likely thousands of episodes; each one is represented (not to scale) above as red bulls-eyes. It is impossible to predict episodes since they are based on a cook's whim, although they are likely often offspring of their subject pursuit.
Episodes can be relatively simple (i.e. chicken breasts) or more elaborate (i.e. a Thai feast). My research has suggested that every cooking episode is logical and systematic, and unfolds as a nine-step cycle of: exploring, planning, provisioning, prepping, assembling, cooking, serving, eating, and evaluating.
This arc is the realm of information seeking and searching, for here is where a cook tries to find the perfect recipe or hunts for more detailed instructions in a culinary encyclopedia or handbook. It is important to note, however, that information seeking and searching are relatively minor and fleeting parts of any episode. Above all, at this arc gourmet cooks engage in information use and re-use, for the larger part of the episode is spent reading, rereading, and following the instructions of a recipe. During a cooking episode the hobbyist is also active in information creation, for they typically generate numerous planning documents such as grocery lists, amalgamated recipes, and timelines.
Episodes can be relatively simple (i.e. chicken breasts) or more elaborate (i.e. a Thai feast). My research has suggested that every cooking episode is logical and systematic, and unfolds as a nine-step cycle of: exploring, planning, provisioning, prepping, assembling, cooking, serving, eating, and evaluating.
This arc is the realm of information seeking and searching, for here is where a cook tries to find the perfect recipe or hunts for more detailed instructions in a culinary encyclopedia or handbook. It is important to note, however, that information seeking and searching are relatively minor and fleeting parts of any episode. Above all, at this arc gourmet cooks engage in information use and re-use, for the larger part of the episode is spent reading, rereading, and following the instructions of a recipe. During a cooking episode the hobbyist is also active in information creation, for they typically generate numerous planning documents such as grocery lists, amalgamated recipes, and timelines.
Implication #1
Each arc serves as a distinct context for different information activities.
Implication #2
Any moment in the hobby pierces all three arcs, and therefore information activities likely interact in complex ways. The black vertical arrows above represent the experiences of two gourmet cooks as they practice the hobby at different points in their career. They can be interpreted from top to bottom: Cook #1, a relative newcomer (in development), is exploring Thai cuisine and makes pad thai. His/her status as a novice and the documentary traditions of Thai cuisine establish a certain kind of information experience. This differs in many ways from cook #2, who in the heyday of his/her career (in maintenance) is studying lowfat cooking and makes a vegetarian lunch. The latter cook departs from a position of greater expertise into a more abundant information environment. There is much to be discovered, still, about the interactions of the arcs and the best way for information institutions (such as libraries and the Internet) to be sensitive to these temporal dynamics.
Implication #3
Holistic information research (in any domain, not just hobbies) should extend beyond short term time frames to consider all temporal arcs. In short, the temporal dimension is important! Yet, Savolainen's (2006) review of time as a context for information seeking reports that few information behavior studies or models explicate the temporal dimension. This line of inquiry in my own work is a step in this direction.
References
Behgtol, C. (2003). Classification for information retrieval and classification for knowledge discovery: Relationships between "professional" and "naive" classification. Knowledge Organization, 30(2), 64-73.
Collier, J. & Collier, M. (1986). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico.
Hartel, J. (2006). Pictures worth a thousand words: A visual approach to libraries in the home. Winnter of the
Dialog/ALISE Methodology Paper Competition 2006. Unpublished manuscript.
Kwasnik, B. H. (1999). The role of classification in knowledge representation and discovery. Library Trends, 48(1), 22-47.
Sandstrom, A. R., & Sandstrom, P.E. (1995). The use and misuse of anthropological methods in library and information science research. Library Quarterly, 65(2), 161-199.
Satija, M. P. (2000). Library classification: An essay in terminology. Knowledge Organization, 27(4), 221-229.
Savolainen, R. (2006). Time as a context of information seeking. Library & Information Science Research, 27, 141-163.
Stebbins, R. A. (2001). New directions in the theory and research of serious leisure. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Collier, J. & Collier, M. (1986). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico.
Hartel, J. (2006). Pictures worth a thousand words: A visual approach to libraries in the home. Winnter of the
Dialog/ALISE Methodology Paper Competition 2006. Unpublished manuscript.
Kwasnik, B. H. (1999). The role of classification in knowledge representation and discovery. Library Trends, 48(1), 22-47.
Sandstrom, A. R., & Sandstrom, P.E. (1995). The use and misuse of anthropological methods in library and information science research. Library Quarterly, 65(2), 161-199.
Satija, M. P. (2000). Library classification: An essay in terminology. Knowledge Organization, 27(4), 221-229.
Savolainen, R. (2006). Time as a context of information seeking. Library & Information Science Research, 27, 141-163.
Stebbins, R. A. (2001). New directions in the theory and research of serious leisure. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.