I’m Steppin’ Out to Salon 294 Bowery tonight to the opening of BODYWORK. classic car aficionados, gawkers, technophiles and marxists alike will be out in full force to see this rigged-up combo of my personal favorite, the classic El Camino truck, with the cab of an East German Trabant. Of course this car display would be incomplete without the mechanic and pin-up girl, none other than Liz Cohen the ironically bikini-clad nouveau feminist classically trained artist herself. How could I possibly forgo such a delicious a mind-mash of representative feminist material intellectualism?

Different Types of Research Using Ephemera

I plan to attend. I am interested in the myriad ways it is possible to study, present, archive/store and “translate” cultural ephemera. Given that my research makes use of ads in National Geographic Magazine (NGM), which as I understand it, are not even included on the CD-Rom’s that the National Geographic Society sells each year. One never knows where inspiration may strike. Cavorting with like-minds seems EXACTLY the place to be for me.

Eureka!!!

I am currently working on the design concept and information flow for the host website for my research project.  My ultimate goal for this visual project is to create an engaging, jargon-free website to interest regular folk to decode the covert messages in ads they see everyday. 

The visual project is its own entity! It is NOT a summary of my research findings or methods. It should be a vehicle for my main goal: to encourage the decoding of everyday advertisements.  I had an “A HA!!” moment. Click here to view this post in its entirety with the video that inspired me!

Thanks for reading!

Shawndel

Myths of Nature in National Geographic Car Advertising

I am using PersonalBrain© technology in this project to to visually map out the relationships between emergent themes from the visual and textual analyses of the extant literature. Eventually this personal brain will be embedded into the dedicated project website and will serve as both a navigation tool and allow users to explore the associated ideas within the research itself.

Myths of Nature in post-WWII National Geographic Car Advertisements by Shwandel N. Fraser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.