Advanced search
Publication Cover
Journal of Marketing Management Volume 38, 2022 - Issue 15-16: Presenting Marketing Differently
Submit an article Journal homepage
773
Views
1
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Studying digitised historical advertisements: experiments, explorations, reflections

Astrid Van den BosscheDepartment of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, London, United KingdomCorrespondence[email protected]
ORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0790-6799View further author information
ORCID Icon
Pages 1815-1820 | Received 10 Apr 2020, Accepted 19 Nov 2021, Published online: 07 Dec 2022

ABSTRACT

In an interactive, non-linear interface and its companion essay, I invite the user to explore how computational methods and digital tools can contribute to the study of advertising histories. The interface was built keeping three tenets in mind: a) that the collection, digitisation, annotation, and visualisation of data is an act of interpretation, and must therefore be open to critique and modification; b) that scholars can use their programming skills to make the former visible and query-able by its users; and c) that this work is an intellectual pursuit in its own right. In the companion essay, I reflect on the development of the interface, as well as its potential to contribute to the exploration and dissemination of scholarly knowledge.

View correction statement:
Correction

Interface

Undergarment ads in the United States, 1947– 1970 is an open-ended, manipulable interface that gives access to a collection of primarily bra and girdle advertisements printed in the United States between 1949 and 1970.

https://astrid.shinyapps.io/UndergarmentAds/

The interface illustrates how digital tools and methods can support the historical study of marketing, and engage a more participatory form of readership. The ambition is to grow the collection and breadth of annotations over time. Please explore the interface at your leisure, before returning to the companion essay.

Introduction to the companion essay

In the Companion Essay, which is an HTML file that can be downloaded from the Supplemental Materials section, I reflect on the ‘case’ that gave rise to this interface, the ‘code’ that underpins it, the ‘archive’ that it gives access to, the nature of the ‘captabase’ that results when these materials are annotated and parametrised, and finally the visual representations, the ‘plot’, that assist in both the exploration and dissemination of resulting insights. The piece contains interactive elements that draw on advertisements from Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.

For security reasons, the publishing platform used by the Journal of Marketing Management does not currently allow the embedded running of JavaScript components, and the file must be downloaded instead. Though this creates additional steps for readers to access the work, its necessity illustrates one of the techno-structural barriers to digital innovation in academic publishing. If you are unable to access the HTML file, the introduction to the essay has been reprinted below.

As recently noted by Nix and Decker (Citation2021), the use of digital sources and technologies in the study of business and organisational histories is pervasive and growing: from digitisation to crowd-sourcing, or born-digital company records to reborn-digital interfaces, digital technologies are having a ‘systemic influence […] within our field’ (Citation2021, p. 3). A 2017 Academy of Management PWD Workshop, for example, explored the ‘Frontiers of Digital History Methods and Tools’ (Gustafsson et al., Citation2017), whilst projects such as the AHRC funded ‘Historicizing the dot.com bubble and contextualising email archives’ (Decker et al., Citation2020) are demonstrating the potential of digitally native materials as sources of historical evidence. Yet the digital also raises other potentials beyond the use of new types of sources, preservation, and accessibility: leveraging modes of inquiry that make use of aggregation, computation, visualisation, and interactivity could provide a new direction for scholarship in humanist subjects (Manovich, Citation2017; Underwood, Citation2019). Indeed, a proposal for a transdisciplinary protocol for digital scholarship highlights how the generation of knowledge today may require novel ways of accessing, analysing, and displaying it, and that researchers ‘should use the most appropriate technologies for [their project’s] requirements’ (Jacobs, Citation2020, p. 6). This, however, would require challenging scholarship and publishing conventions.

The interface presented above exemplifies one such set of potentials. I developed it to access a collection of mid-century undergarment advertisements. The ads were collected to reconstruct the sector’s advertising patterns and to contextualise its marketing practices. Dealing with large sets of images that are spread out in time and space is a challenge, and therefore provides an alluring case for the use of various digital tools. In short, the interface provides access to the collection and its annotations, and starts to aggregate (e.g. calculating advertising frequency) and visualise (e.g. mapping store fronts) these materials. However, given that this study is interpretivist in orientation, graphing data creates a puzzling tension between qualitative and quantitative research values. One potential resolution is to enable the user/reader to query and question the collection and its visualisations, thus displacing the author as sole owner of the resulting insights. Making plots interactive and manipulable, for example, means that users can test visualisation assumptions that are otherwise typically unalterable.

As it stands, these affordances are not fully available or customisable in popular research software, and I therefore chose to build an interface from scratch. Learning to program is not currently considered to be an essential skill for qualitative researchers, but I put forward the case that familiarising oneself with computational thinking can, at the very least, assist in understanding how layers of technology mediate our access, as historians, to our primary sources. At best, it empowers the researcher to produce tools that support their scholarly inquiries. Researchers who code can also leverage these skills to develop interactive pedagogical materials, such as apps that expose the inner workings of a visualisation or statistical calculation (e.g. Lunzer & McNamara Citation2017a, Citation2017b). In other words, rather than just an instrument in service of ‘hard’ science, the computer is put forward as a ‘sketchpad, sandbox, prototyping kit, telescope, and microscope’ deployed for the study of cultural history (Montfort, Citation2016, p. 11).

As a result, I argue that custom-made interfaces such as these can function as connective tissue between the data, the researcher, and a wider public. It provides an opportunity to ‘present (historical) marketing differently’, as is the purpose of this special issue, and can be used for the purposes of dissemination, public outreach, and teaching, as well as research. Besides providing access to the collection, the aim of the interface is threefold:

  1. to demonstrate the constructiveness of historical data;

  2. to use exploratory programming as a key practice in analytical inquiry, and make this visible to the user/reader;

  3. to treat the prototype as an argument in itself.

The full piece can be downloaded from the Supplemental Materials section.

Supplemental material

Supplemental Material

Download Zip (16.1 MB)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2144417.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Astrid Van den Bossche

Astrid Van den Bossche is a Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her research interests span across marketing history and theory, economic socialisation, and applications of computational methods in consumer culture.

References

  • Decker, S., Kirsch, D. A., Kuppili Venkata, S., & Nix, A. (2020). Historicizing the dot.com bubble and contextualizing email archives. University of Bristol.
  • Jacobs, B. (2020). A transdisciplinary protocol for digital scholarship. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36(1), 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz087
  • Gustafsson, R., Ernkvist, M., Edward Harvey, C., Ernkvist, M., Maclean, M., Peter Murmann, J., Rowlinson, M., & Kirsch, D. A. (2017). PDW: Frontiers of digital history methods and tools for management, organization, and history scholars. In Organizational History Network. Atlanta.
  • Lunzer, A., & McNamara, A. (2017a). Exploring histograms.
  • Lunzer, A., & McNamara, A. (2017b). Introduction to the ‘Exploring Histograms’ online essay. VPRI Research Note, (RN–2017–003), 3.
  • Manovich, L. (2017). The science of culture? Social computing, digital humanities, and cultural analytics. In M. T. Schaefer & K. van Es (Eds.), The datafied society. Studying culture through data [Electronic Resource] (pp. 55-68). Amsterdam University Press.
  • Montfort, N. (2016). Exploratory programming for the arts and humanities. The MIT Press.
  • Nix, A., & Decker, S. (2021). Using digital sources: The future of business history? Business History. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1909572
  • Underwood, T. (2019). Distant horizons: Digital evidence and literary change. University of Chicago Press.

References cited in the companion essay

  • Belk, R., Fischer, E., & Kozinets, R. V. (2012). Qualitative consumer and marketing research. SAGE.
  • Berry, D. M. (2017). The post-archival constellation: The archive under the technical conditions of computational media. In I. Blom, T. Lundemo, & E. Røssaak (Eds.), Memory in motion: Archives, technology and the social (pp. 103–126). Amsterdam University Press.
  • Bode, K. (2017). The equivalence of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading; or, toward a new object for data-rich literary history. Modern Language Quarterly, 78(1), 77–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3699787
  • Boggs, J., Reed, J., & Purdom Lindblad, J. K. (2017). Making it matter. In J. Sayers (Ed.), Making things and drawing boundaries: Experiments in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Burdick, A., Drucker, J., & Lunenfeld, P. (2012). Digital_humanities. MIT Press.
  • Burrows, J. F. (1987). Computation into criticism: A study of Jane Austen’s novels and an experiment in method. Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press.
  • Case, N. (n.d.). Explorable explanations. http://explorabl.es/
  • Champion, E. M. (2017). Digital humanities is text heavy, visualization light, and simulation poor. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32(suppl_1), i25–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw053
  • Chapman, C., & McDonnell Feit, E. (2019). R for marketing research and analytics. Springer.
  • Deacon, D. (2008). Why counting counts. In M. Pickering (Ed.), Research methods for cultural studies. Edinburgh University Press.
  • Digital Preservation Coalition. (2019). The BitList 2019: The global list of digitally endangered species. Digital Preservation Coalition.
  • Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities approaches to graphical display. Digital Humanities Quarterly 005(1).
  • Drucker, J. (2013). Performative materiality and theoretical approaches to interface. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 007(1).
  • Drucker, J. (2015). Graphical approaches to the digital humanities. In A new companion to digital humanities ( pp. 238–250). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
  • English, J. F., & Underwood, T. (2016). Shifting scales between literature and social science. Modern Language Quarterly 77(3), 277–295.
  • Ernst, W. (2012). Digital memory and the archive (J. Parikka, Ed.). University of Minnesota Press.
  • Fawcett, L. (2018). Using interactive shiny applications to facilitate research-informed learning and teaching. Journal of Statistics Education, 26(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2018.1436999
  • Galey, A., & Ruecker, S. (2010). How a prototype argues. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(4), 405–424. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq021
  • Gitelman, L. (2013). Raw data is an oxymoron (Infrastructures Series). The MIT Press.
  • Gold, M. K., & Klein, L. F. (2019). Debates in the digital humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Hall, G. (2013). Toward a postdigital humanities: Cultural analytics and the computational turn to data-driven scholarship. American Literature, 85(4), 781–809. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367337
  • Hancher, M. (2016). Re: Search and close reading. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Healy, K. J. (2019). Data visualization: A practical introduction. Princeton University Press.
  • Hirschman, E. C. (1986). Humanistic inquiry in marketing research: Philosophy, method, and criteria. Journal of Marketing Research, 23(3), 237–249.
  • Jordanova, L. J. (2019). History in practice (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
  • King, L., & Leonard, P. (2014). Robots reading Vogue. http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/
  • Klein, J. T. (2017). The boundary work of making in the digital humanities. In J. Sayers (Ed.), Making things and drawing boundaries: Experiments in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Klein, L. F. (2013). The image of absence: Archival silence, data visualization, and James Hemings. American Literature, 85,(4), 661–688. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310
  • Leon, S. (2019). The peril and promise of historians as data creators: Perspective, structure, and the problem of representation [Working Paper].
  • Marino, M. C. (2016). Why we must read the code: The science wars, episode IV. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • McDonough, J., & Egolf, K. (2015). The advertising age encyclopedia of advertising. Routledge.
  • Milligan, I. (2019). History in the age of abundance?: How the web is transforming historical research. McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP.
  • Montfort, N. (2016b). Exploratory programming in digital humanities pedagory and research. In S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A new companion to digital humanities (pp. 98–109). John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
  • Mordhorst, M. (2008). From counterfactual history to counternarrative history. Management & Organizational History, 3(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1744935908090995
  • Mordhorst, M., & Schwarzkopf, S. (2017). Theorising narrative in business history. Business History, 59(8), 1155–1175. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2017.1357697
  • Pechenick, E. A., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2015). Characterizing the Google Books corpus: Strong limits to inferences of socio-cultural and linguistic evolution. PLOS ONE, 10(10), e0137041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041
  • Porsdam, H. (2013). Digital humanities: On finding the proper balance between qualitative and quantitative ways of doing research in the humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 007(3).
  • Porter, T. M. (1996). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (New ed.). Princeton University Press.
  • Ramsay, S. (2014). The hermeneutics of screwing around; or what you do with a million books. In K. Kee (Ed.), Pastplay: Teaching and learning history with technology. University of Michigan Press.
  • Ramsay, S., & Rockwell, G. (2012). Developing things: Notes toward an epistemology of building in the digital humanities. In M. K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Rudis, B., Ross, N., & Garnier, S. (2018). The Viridis color palettes.
  • Sayers, J. (Ed.). (2017). Making things and drawing boundaries: Experiments in the digital humanities. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Schwarzkopf, S. (2015). Marketing history from below: Towards a paradigm shift in marketing historical research. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 7(3), 295–309.
  • Scott, L. M., Chambers, J., & Sredl, K. (2006). The Monticello correction: Consumption in History. In R. W. Belk (Ed.), Handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing. Edward Elgar.
  • Shelley, C. (1996). Visual abductive reasoning in archaeology. Philosophy of Science, 63(2), 278–301. https://doi.org/10.1086/289913
  • Smith, A., & Umemura, M. (2019). Prospects for a transparency revolution in the field of business history. Business History, 61,(6), 919–941. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2018.1439019
  • Underwood, T. (2015). The literary uses of high-dimensional space. Big Data & Society, 2(2).
  • Underwood, T. (2017). A genealogy of distant reading. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11(2).
  • Van Zundert, J. (2016). Screwmeneutics and hermenumericals: The computationality of hermeneutics. In S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A new companion to digital humanities (pp. 98–109). John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
  • Verhoef, J. (2015). The cultural-historical value of and problems with digitized advertisements: Historical newspapers and the portable radio, 1950-1969. TS: Tijdschrift Voor Tijdschriftstudies, 38, 51–60.
  • Victor, B. (2011). Explorable explanations. http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/
  • Wang, J., Min, W., Hou, S., Ma, S., Zheng, Y., & Jiang, S. (2020). LogoDet-3k: A large-scale image dataset for logo detection. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10 (20). http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05359
  • Warwick, C. (2016). Building theories or theories of building? A tension at the heart of digital humanities. In S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A new companion to digital humanities. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
  • Warwick, C. (2019). Interfaces, ephemera, and identity: A study of the historical presentation of digital humanities resources. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, December. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz081
  • Wevers, M., & Smits, T. (2020a). Detecting faces, visual medium types, and gender in historical advertisements1950. In , A. Bartoli & A. Fusiello (Eds.), Computer Vision ECCV 2020 Workshops, (pp. 77–91). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66096-3_7
  • Wevers, M., & Smits, T. (2020b). The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy085
  • Wickham, H. (2014). Tidy data. Journal of Statistical Software, 59(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v059.i10
  • Wilk, R. R. (2001). The impossibility and necessity of re-inquiry: Finding middle ground in social science. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(2), 308–312.
Download PDF

Related research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.