Creating Technology for Social Change

Studying marketplace stories of origin

The Tecnu Story

I plan to complete research for a critical study that will inform a project I am currently working on, a web-based framework for collecting and analyzing stories of origin printed on product packages (ex. “Born in 1908 to a Jewish family that had been making soap since 1858, Emanuel Bronner was the third generation certified as a master-soapmaker under the guild system of the time. …”). The primary goal of the collection is bring together a wide variety of these narratives in a space outside the marketplace — to appoint them with a genre and a public repository — in order to provide a basis for research on conditions of professional text production; overlapping meanings and uses for storytelling, advertising, and publishing; and relationships between marketplace stories of origin and other accounts of a company’s history, among other topics. For Intro to Civic Media, I will use two stories of origin as case studies and research and compare their production, circulation and reception. This will also be an opportunity to review existing literature, and to start thinking about metrics that could be used to gauge the accuracy of these narratives. The end product will be a written paper.