Readings for April 8

Here are the readings for our theme on "Local business or community service marketing to a target public through print or online means."  This was a tricky one for me to find readings on in short order, but I think the following texts will provide a productive mix:

• Jon Goss, "'We know who you are and we know where you live': The instrumental rationality of geodemographic systems," Economic Geography (1995).
• Richard K. Popp. "Making advertisements material: Checking departments, systematic reading, and geographic order in nineteenth-century advertising," Book History (2011).

(Those two should work well together ... Goss talks about practices in tracking demographic groups for advertising using new geographic tools that grew up with digital computing, and Popp tells the story about pre-digital practices for tracking print advertising's effectiveness across the nation.)

• David M. Henkin, "City streets and the urban world of print," in Scott E. Casper et al., eds., A history of the book in America, vol. 3 (2007).
• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Arcelia Hernández, "Talking the walk: Children reading urban environmental print," The Reading Teacher (1999).

(These should also work well together, with Henkin outlining a historical view of print-laden urban space, and Orellana and Hernández using such an environment today to understand children's literacy practices.)

• Joseph Turow, "The customized store," in Niche Envy: Marketing discrimination in the digital age (2006).
• Sara L. Wimberley and Jessica L. McClean, "Supermarket savvy: The everyday information-seeking behavior of grocery shoppers," Information & Culture: A journal of history (2012).

(Finally, these should work together as well, one focused on behind-the-scenes data analytics and one focused on actual print advertising products.)

Here are the assignments for these six readings:

• Pratesi and Ineichen: Goss article summary and author info, respectively
• Marshall and Meneses-Hall: Popp article summary and author info, respectively
• Bottomley and Roeder: Henkin article summary and author info, respectively
• Pegues and Bond: Orellana and Hernández article summary and author info, respectively
• Bard and Zhang: Turow article summary and author info, respectively
• Stalker and Boehm: Wimberley and McClean article summary and author info, respectively
• Toff: Discussion questions!