I wanted to find topics for the proposed course without imposing my own bias of what is iconic imagery and franchise symbolism. Rather than searching particular visualizations—female silhouettes, gun barrels—I chose search themes that reflect content forms and genres. Posters and Film and Franchise look at format-specific manifestations of Bond, while Marketing and Lifestyle and Re-representation are format agnostic but source-genre specific.
An important part of my strategy was to dive deep on most searches. James Bond, in addition to being a pop culture topic with a long history, is especially relevant in media right now. Therefore, no matter the specificity or length of the search string, thousands of results were going to surface (on Google) and many of them would not be a great fit for the course. I viewed results up to page 11 . Although I briefly tried other Web search engines, I found that searching with Chrome/on Google learned from itself and provided the best search experience.
1. Marketing and Lifestyle: Sources, preferably primary, for illustrating how Bond is visually depicted, and what this is intended to portray, in media like advertising and lifestyle magazines.
I used the terms James Bond tourism because I thought it would identify potential datasets as well as marketing content. I then used James Bond to search specific sources of marketing and lifestyle content (such as Factiva database, 007 Magazine), as well as targeted searches on sites of well-known Bond-approved brands, like Omega and Aston Martin. Content in this theme was also easily identified through the Film and Franchise search.
2. Film and Franchise: Sources to be used as foundational pieces for the course, addressing the films and visualization of Bond more generally.
For finding information about film and franchise broadly, I chose to construct searches in specific source locations where a simple “James Bond” could be used to find content. This involved identifying potential books, journals, and databases through UBC library website—by looking for sources under content-source themes of film, art, and design—and then searching identified databases/journals with James Bond.
Search strings played a key roll on the Web pairing James Bond with broad themes of the course, such as Visual culture, opening titles, visualizing, motifs and with specific content forms like documentary.
3. Re-representation: Bond re-represented through infographics, parodies, fan art, etc.
Results for this topic were typically identified through other searches conducted, which all produced some re-imagined Bond content. For example, James Bond dataset produced info graphics, and the Poster searches included re-representations. The only specific search for this theme was James Bond music video, to find a video re-representation.
4.Posters: A format-specific visualization, but can encompass broad resource types, from official posters, to commentary and analysis of posters, and re-representations.
Through other searches I had already identified a few sources for this topic. Therefore, I used terms like critique, movie poster, poster with James Bond and Archer (a parody I knew to have Bond-influenced posters) to direct my search on Google. From search results, I browsed content and clicked through websites to find the depictions that I thought would be good for the course.