Vogue Archive

On the heels of last month's Fashion Week we are happy to welcome a new addition to the Penn Library website,  The Vogue Archive. 

The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. More than 400,000 pages are included, constituting a treasure trove of the work from the greatest designers, photographers, stylists and illustrators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Vogue is a unique record of American and international popular culture that extends beyond fashion. The Vogue Archive is an essential primary source for the study of fashion, gender and modern social history – past, present and future.
 
The database will allow fashion design and photography students to find inspirational images, but will also cater for academic study. Fashion marketing students will be able to research the history of a brand identity by viewing every advertisement for a brand such as Revlon, Coty, Versace or Chanel between specified dates. Researchers in cultural studies and gender studies will be able to explore themes such as body image, gender roles and social tastes from the 1890s to the present.  --Proquest

What's really great is that as historical as the archive is, it will continually be current, that is, the latest issue will be added each month with no embargo period (thank you Conde Nast!). Users can search on all text, captions, and titles throughout the magazine, including advertisements and covers.

British Periodicals

Once can do some serious historical investigation of the early periodical press in England with this latest Penn Libraries e-resource addition.

About British Periodicals:

British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of more than 460 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture....In addition to providing access to the original periodical versions of landmark texts like De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Cobbett's Rural Rides, Bagehot's The English Constitution, Gaskell's North and South and Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the collection offers new ways of exploring the inaccessible, neglected or forgotten writings that formed their original contexts. A wide array of different types of periodical are represented, from magisterial quarterlies and scholarly and professional organs through to coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

Journal Roundup: Noteworthy Special Issues

You may have noticed this blog likes to highlight special themed issues of journals. Here are a few of late:

Journalism Studies, Volume 8, Number 4 (August 2007)
Mapping the Magazine, guest edited by Tim Holmes. Includes articles on For Women, women's pornography magazine; irony in men's magazines; Kate Moss and photojournlism; South Africa's Drum, women's magazines in Russia, gossip magazines in Spain, consumer magazines in South Africa and Israel, metal music magazines, and 19th Century popular science magazines.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs Volume 10, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
Rhetoric and the War in Iraq, guest edited by Herbert W. Simons. Includes an article by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Justifying the War in Iraq: What the Bush Administration's Uses of Evidence Reveal."

Journal of Consumer Culture Volume 7, Number 2 (July 2007)
Citizenship and Consumption, guest edited by Frank Trentmann and Don Slater.

Televizion (20/2007/E)
TV for TV Beginners, Edited by Maya Gotz. This German journal devoted to children and television limits this issue to infants through preschoolers. Not all issues of Televizion are in English but this one is.

Information Communication & Society Volume 10, Number 3 (2007)
Gender and ICT, guest edited by Clem Herman and Juliet Webster.

Social Semiotics (Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2007)
Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification, guest edited by Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray. The papers that make up this special issue are drawn from the Body Modification: Mark II Conference, held at Macquarie University in 2005. Explain the editors: "The vast array of practices, discourses and texts discussed at this conference led to the coining of the neologism "somatechnics." The inextricability of soma - the body - and technics, techniques, technologies and technes is thus at the heart of a set of politicised and critical interrogations of subjectivity and bodily being. This issue, engaging as it does with such a range of body modificatory practices, offers a consideration of this newly named area of study." Articles on the corset, queer culture, colonialism and corporal punishment, the Body Worlds exhibit, the surgical imaginary, deviant (fat) bodies, and genital modification collect around this theme.

Harper's Magazine Digital Archive

The Harper's Magazine Digital Archive is now available on the Penn Library website.
Online access to Harper's Magazine, the oldest general interest monthly in America, goes back to its inception, 1850. Featuring essays, in depth reporting, as well as fiction, Harper's is known for its fine writing and independent perspectives on politics and culture. It has featured some of the most notable writers of the day, from Horatio Alger, Mark Twain and Theodore Drieser to John Updike, Tom Wolfe and T.C. Boyle. Interestingly, the iconic Harper's Index is rather "young" in terms of the magazine's lifespan; it began in 1984. A spoof of the Index, Harper's Index Index, honoring the magazine's 150 anniversary includes such perspicacious comparisons as:

Months after its inception that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 11
Months after the French Revolution that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 2,336