About the Lunch visualisation

Background

The University of North Texas Libraries hosts an image collection of lunch trays photographed before and after lunch. The images are part of the project Food Choice and Waste in Texas Middle School Cafeterias by Priscilla Connors & Kirby Sandifer. There's an infographic providing a nice overview and an in depth report available online.

There is no stated license for the images. Permission has been granted by Priscilla Connors to publish the Lunch visualisation at the Royal Danish Library. For other use of the images, please contact University of North Texas Libraries.

Motivation

The University of North Texas Libraries' collection of lunch trays is a rare gem:

The limited menu possibilities dictated by the lunch program means that the visual variations of the images in the full collection are subtle. That's an exciting property: Thousands of same-yet-different images. This works very well for displaying the images alongside each other, getting both an aesthetically pleasing sameness and a more functional support for discovering the images that stand out.

The trays on the individual photos has consistent alignment and lightning which strongly support the illusion of having x-ray vision (or rather tempus vision).

Technical

The Lunch visualisation is a combination of the general collage generator juxta and JavaScript fiddling.

Currently the code for creating synchronized collage pairs has not been published, as a large part of the Lunch visualisation was hand held tweaking. Hopefully a generic version will be added to the juxta project somewhen.

Plans

Contact

We welcome feedback and ideas for future development.

Back to Lunch visualisation