Claudia Wagner presents "Food and Culture"

Claudia Wagner

Title: "Food and Culture" ABSTRACT           
Food is a central element of humans' life, and food preferences are amongst others manifestations of social, cultural and economic forces that influence the way we view, prepare and consume food. Historically, data for studies of food preferences stems from consumer panels which continuously capture food consumption and preference patterns from individuals and households. In this talk we will look at a new source of data, i.e., server log data from a large recipe platform on the World Wide Web, and explore its usefulness for understanding online food preferences. Further, we we will explore how multilingual and collaboratively generated descriptions of food on Wikipedia may allow us to infer and assess relations between different cultural communities.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Claudia Wagner is a post doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science department at GESIS – Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Koblenz-Landau. She received her PhD in Computer Science at Graz University of Technology. During her graduate work, she interned with HP Lab's Social Computing group and Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition team. Claudia is interested in exploring to what extent digital traces can be used to learn about interests, preferences, knowledge, information needs and biases of individuals and societies and how new technologies and algorithms may impact them.