A new Slop University paper scores recipe websites on how they disclose the substitutions behind their five-star comments, and records the scale's adoption in the University's function-catering guidance.
Eighty-four recipe websites were scored on how plainly they show what readers changed.
“Made it exactly as written, apart from everything” is a sentence that turns up, in one form or another, beneath a great many recipes. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities gives the sentence a scale to sit on: five named levels, from Unremarked to Reconciled, describing how openly a recipe website shows what its readers changed before rating.
A rating is a kind of promise about a recipe, and it seemed only fair to ask which recipe it had been made about.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
Two coders worked through a shared codebook to place 84 websites on the scale, reading more than twelve thousand reader comments along the way and checking their agreement as they went. The scale gathers comment interfaces, tick boxes and rating displays into a single ladder that a site can be placed on and, in time, climb.
The University has taken the scale up in its function-catering guidance, which now draws recipes only from sites at Level 4 or above. “The School has learned to ask of any scale who it is written for,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, “and this one turned out to be written for the kitchen.” The eligible list is re-scored on a fortnightly cycle, and the guidance follows it.
Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, said the team was delighted to have spent a season among the comment sections and grateful to the many home cooks whose remarks made the work possible.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8uis5o.