The Human Labour of Data Work: Capturing Cultural Diversity through World Wide Dishes

Understand

This paper provides guidance for building and maintaining infrastructure for participatory AI efforts by sharing reflections on building World Wide Dishes (WWD), a bottom-up, community-led image and text dataset of culinary dishes and associated cultural customs.

• We present WWD as an example of participatory dataset creation, where community members both guide the design of the research process and contribute to the crowdsourced dataset.
• This approach incorporates localised expertise and knowledge to address the limitations of web-scraped Internet datasets acknowledged in the Participatory AI discourse.
• We show that our approach can result in curated, high-quality data that supports decentralised contributions from communities that do not typically contribute to datasets due to a variety of systemic factors.