Slide 1
The set I selected is ‘What Women Want To Know’, sourced from the Harvard Digital Collections.
This is a catalogue focusing on ‘advertising brochures aimed at women’, reflecting the cultural and consumer expectations of society about women’s areas of interest and lifestyle areas from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It is organised around five categories: Cooking, Household Appliances, Cleaning, Health, and Beauty, with 211 items in total.
Slide 2
They stem from the same medium and purpose. The large number of them are advertisements or promotional brochures that target women’s household and personal care needs with a mixed message of ‘guidance, science education, and product recommendations.’
Slide 3
Across different specialized fields, text and image balance show distinct tendencies. Cooking sections favor lengthy recipe texts with a few ingredient illustrations.
Slide 4
Household Appliances and Cleaning balance situational graphics, flowcharts, and text about half and half.
Slide 5
While Health and Beauty feature a lighter text with tips, and flowcharts or product descriptions take up more space.
Slide 6
They combine to create a consumer grammar chain related to ‘household-body-technology.’ Cooking is based on Household Appliances, while Cleaning, Health, and Beauty are interconnected. This interplay makes each component less independent, forming a framework of chained consumption narratives.
Slide 7
This set contains a large number of consistent rhetorical elements, such as ‘guide to… / ology / Dr. tone / for ladies’, which are frequently used to confer credibility. Moreover, they originate from the same institutional context: their provenance traces back to the collection series of the Schlesinger Library.
The original spread through low-cost outlets, by mail, in-store distribution, and magazine inserts. Today, it serves researchers as part of the Harvard Library collection.
Slide 8 （cataloguing 1）
I used (Re)contextualising to place this Set within the context of ‘anxiety-driven information search’: I categorised it according to the cues users seek when in states of uncertainty and anxiety (such as Odour / Drudgery / Germs / Pain / Ageing). Translating the original set’s promise structure into search entry points aligned with audience needs, establishing a user-centric catalogue.
Slide 9 （cataloguing 2）
I saw the ‘record ID’ label within the original set, so I looked into its coding principle. This is a Persistent Internal Identifier called ‘MMS ID’ used by Harvard Library, representing the time of data entry. I then used Sequencing to contrast human archival logic with machine archival logic, exploring the tension arising from the logical shift between the ‘original order’ in archival science and the ‘access order’ of digital platforms.
Slide 11 （cataloguing 3）
And I used Framing to separate sets into Company / Pub. House / Independent publisher, focusing on the ‘’sources of words’’. Readers can first see who is speaking and who is participating in this field of voice. This allows readers to understand the visual and content leanings of the materials through the lens of ‘publishing identity’.
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