viz.

Image credit: screen shot of Emergence of Advertising in America database 

On March 26^th  Noel will be leading our workshop on Best Practices for Digital Images here at the DWRL and in preparation for that meeting many of us at viz. are compiling several blog postings on image databases.  This week Rachel posted about Radical Software—a database that provides access to work done in the ‘seventies with the creation of and theorizing about digital and video media.  I’d like to take us back even further to a database dedicated to making available early advertising images from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s.  I found Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 to be extremely entertaining to browse and can easily imagine integrating it into my classroom practice.

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 is housed at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History as part of the Duke University Libraries.  The database is home to over 9,000 images from the early period in American advertising.  Because the strength of this collection centers on the period of increasing professionalization within the field of commercial advertising and the rise of national print magazines, this database holds many many images that will be of use to those of us who work with visual culture.  Moreover, the ability to access so many early advertisements may provide several unique opportunities for the use of these images in our classroom.  Obviously, these images would be useful for any unit providing a history to advertising in this early period but I also think that access to so many early ads might offer some contextualization for popular advertising campaigns today.  Introducing students to these earlier advertisements may help to denaturalize to pervasive nature of contemporary marketing tools.

The database is easily searchable—especially fun is to use the search function to look up early advertisements for particular products.  Typing in “perfume” or “soap” or “cola,” for instance, yields several fascinating results.  Browsing through the collection strengths was also amusing—the database has designated pages for the history of specific campaigns, including Pond’s, Kodak, as well as for the history of particular types of advertising strategies, including broadsides, trading cards, calendars, and advertising cookbooks.  I hope this resource proves as useful for your research and your pedagogy as it might for your entertainment.