TY - JOUR
T1 - On Cars and Food
T2 - Reflections on Sources for the Historical Study of Everyday Information Behavior
AU - Aspray, William
AU - Ocepek, Melissa G.
AU - Royer, George
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - Historical approaches are beginning to be used in the study of everyday information behavior. The ideal sources for carrying out this kind of scholarship would be large bodies of correspondence or large numbers of diary entries that discuss particular everyday activities, spread across long periods of time. Given the general lack of availability of these kinds of sources, historically minded everyday information behavior scholars need to find alternative source materials to employ in their research, even if these sources give only indirect rather than direct information about individuals’ everyday information behavior. This article discusses a number of these alternative sources (consumer magazines, popular magazines, corporate marketing literature, guidebooks, reviews, and various kinds of advertising) and shows how they were used in historical studies on car buying and eating out in America.
AB - Historical approaches are beginning to be used in the study of everyday information behavior. The ideal sources for carrying out this kind of scholarship would be large bodies of correspondence or large numbers of diary entries that discuss particular everyday activities, spread across long periods of time. Given the general lack of availability of these kinds of sources, historically minded everyday information behavior scholars need to find alternative source materials to employ in their research, even if these sources give only indirect rather than direct information about individuals’ everyday information behavior. This article discusses a number of these alternative sources (consumer magazines, popular magazines, corporate marketing literature, guidebooks, reviews, and various kinds of advertising) and shows how they were used in historical studies on car buying and eating out in America.
U2 - 10.1353/lac.2014.0019
DO - 10.1353/lac.2014.0019
M3 - Article
SN - 2164-8034
VL - 49
SP - 492
EP - 525
JO - Information & Culture: A Journal of History
JF - Information & Culture: A Journal of History
IS - 4
ER -