By Mark Shainblum
Join us as we unearth the hidden gems and secret places on the websites of McGill University and its affiliated institutions.
Print Culture and Urban Visuality
They were lurid, sexy and violent, with titles like True Crime, Montréal Detective, The Broadway Tattler, Chicago Hush and Police Magazine. They were the cheap, pulpy urban crime newspapers, magazines and serial novels published in big cities like Montreal, New York, Philadelphia and Paris from the 1930’s to the 1950’s (and in some cases, through to the present day.) McGill professor Will Straw, of the Department of Art History and Communications Studies created this website and says that in this blood-spattered genre, “the city was re-enchanted, re-envisioned as a place of mysterious spaces and elusive histories. Serialized crime novels, crime-oriented newspapers and the photojournalism of metropolitan daily newspapers produced a sense of the city as riddled with places which escape order (its dark corners and hideaways) and with its own, invisible forms of order (its networks of conspiracy and demi-mondes of eccentric behavior.)”
http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/ahcs/cultureofcities/Print%20Culture.html
Factiva (via the McGill Library website)
Factiva — owned by Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal — is one of the world’s leading news and information companies. Researchers and business executives pay a pretty penny for access to its huge database of current and archived articles from the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Dow Jones, Reuters, the Associated Press and about 25,000 other authoritative sources. Members of the McGill community are entitled to access Factiva for free through the library website, as long as you are using an on-campus computer, or your own computer with the McGill VPN running.
www.mcgill.ca/library-findinfo/newspapers
Do you know of any great McGill web gems we haven’t covered yet? Please send them to mark.shainblum@mcgill.ca