Alien Archive

Una Zhang

Unaz.site

For this project, I compiled dumpling names from two sources: historic cookbooks from the Internet Archive and contemporary recipe names scraped from recipe websites, online cookbooks, and food blogs.

1st pass

The first dataset consisted almost entirely of historic cookbook data. The model generated "Apple" repeatedly because Apple Dumpling appeared 489 times out of 1,709 entries (29% of the dataset). This reflects the dominance of apple dumplings in English cookbooks before the 20th century. More broadly, the word dumpling in these sources referred mainly to British dumplings rather than the East Asian dumplings the term is more commonly associated with today.

2nd pass

I added around 100 contemporary dumpling names and capped each historic recipe at ten repetitions. While this reduced the dominance of Apple Dumpling, the outputs were still fairly generic because the historic names remained overrepresented.

3rd pass

The final dataset contained 542 unique dumpling names: 162 historic names from the Internet Archive and 380 contemporary names from eight scraped recipe sources. Compared to the historic dataset, the contemporary names contain more descriptors: introduced greater variety in ingredients, cooking methods, transliterated names such as momo and har gow, and expressive spelling online. As a result, the model generated outputs like "Fried Beeeeeef Dum..." and "Steamed Pork..." while also producing hybrids such as "Homo," where it recombined unfamiliar character sequences and naming conventions.



Back to Participant Work Back to Participant Work