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AdArchive

AdArchive expands feminist periodical scholarship with an innovative focus on advertisements from feminist-identified journals. To date, there is limited scholarship exploring advertisements in social movement periodicals and minimal exploration of how advertisements functioned to establish and sustain networks among publications, publishers, readers, and social movement organizations. AdArchive’s research indicates that, despite their political differences and frequent struggles to stay afloat, feminist periodicals rarely viewed each other as competitors in the magazine market. Instead, magazines encouraged their readers to expand their engagement with feminist movements by including advertisements for other feminist magazines, events, activities, and enterprises in the back pages of each issue.

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AdArchive and LINCS​

AdArchive has converted its collection for ingestion into the LINCS triplestore. AdArchive’s collection contains advertisements from 1979 that appeared in feminist magazines, including Heresies, Country Women, off our backs, Chrysalis, Frontiers, Sinister Wisdom, and Feminist Studies. The starting point for the project was Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, which was a well-known, long-lived, and far-reaching feminist journal published by an editorial collective based in New York City between 1977 and 1992. AdArchive isolated 209 advertisements in Heresies and created triples to describe each ad, including its:

  • Source
  • Location
  • Title
  • Subtitle
  • Ad copy
  • Images
  • Logos
  • Lists of forthcoming topics and contents
  • Contact information for contributors or subscribers
  • Subscription forms
  • Subscription fee information

AdArchive views advertisements as indices of the complex networks that sustained feminist-­identified social movement magazines. By converting this data into Linked Open Data (LOD), the project is better able to understand early networked feminisms and how these advertisements were part of rich, diverse, interconnected, and overlapping networks.

Project Leads​

  • Michelle Meagher, Director
  • Jana Smith Elford, Director
  • Timothy Arthur, Technical Director
  • Erin Sanderman, Researcher
  • Tegan Nelson, Researcher
  • Alex Soriano, Researcher
  • Joel Blechinger, Researcher
  • Ashlynn Weisberg, Researcher

Funders​

AdArchive is currently funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.

Dataset Details​