Overbaked and Underproofed: An interactive investigation of the judging language in the Great British Baking Show (GBBS), seeks to create and provide a platform that fosters a critical engagement with an aspect of language as used in a popular reality TV phenomenon. 

By extracting and analyzing the vocabulary and language usage in the judging segments of a season of GBBS, the project seeks to probe the perceived paucity of evaluative language and then look at what the results might reveal about our culture’s easy relationship with quick judgment and our in/ability to translate the sense of taste for a screen-based medium. 

Via a website targeted at the general audience of GBBS and interested linguists, the project features visualizations of the analyzed language, academic discourse around the problems and methods of the topic, as well as an interactive Judge-this-bake Bingo game (populated with the most frequently used judgment expressions) that can be played while re/watching episodes of GBBS. The project aims to induce a shift in popular media consumption by bringing consciousness to the use of evaluative expressions and the framework of judgment, ultimately producing a new and expanded literacy.

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