Using advertisements as data

The central ‘location’ of my data was originally intended to be the small ads that appear in the free scene magazines that are available in London’s gay bars (and for a period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some gyms and other venues with predominantly gay male clients). As discussed in the previous chapter, queer theory and feminist scholars advocate using a broad source of media as texts including magazines (Halberstam, 2011; Jankowski et al., 2014; Reavey (ed.), 2011) and past research has established using personal ads as a rich

source of data regarding self-presentation and mate-selection (Child et al., 1996; Davis, 1990;

Deaux and Hanna, 1984). Cameron et al. (1999) studied escort advertisements in Gay Times from in the mid-nineties. More recent work has looked at sex work advertising online (Logan, 2010; Phua and Caras, 2008; Phua et al., 2009). My work builds on previous research by focusing on advertisements in the gay-scene magazine, Boyz, between 1991 and 2012 and in the online profiles of Gaydar.net (2008-2012) as the corpora for a corpus-assisted analysis. I use these data and this method to demonstrate how reiterated patterns of lexical items and their collocates convey broader social messages (discourses) as they build up over – and are reconstructed as – large amounts of text’ (Baker and McEnery, 2012). I build on an early quantification of content-analysis by using a semiotic approach to explore how the ads create as well as convey meaning (Williamson, 2002) and triangulate my findings with constant comparison between categories and across the multiple forms of texts (Charmaz, 2006).

Judith Williamson’s seminal work explores how advertising ‘creates structures of meaning’

(Williamson, 2002, p.12). Williamson analyses advertisements through semiotics, exploring the meanings constructed across advertisements for different products and services, and deconstructing the elements within advertisements. This approach fits nicely with the aims of queer theory as a way to apply some rigour to an otherwise very open-ended, mellifluous method of analysis.

To begin, I had two objectives: first, to survey the development and the evolution of the escort advertising format and content from its introduction in 1991. This offers a historical record of the advertisements as a corpus (Baker, 2003) and an insight into some of the representations and practices for contemporary escort advertising and even personal profiles that we see today. The second objective was to build on multi-modal analysis of texts that shift with verbal and visual data (Jones, 2005). I make use of the visual texts that have been incorporated into the advertisements, and illustrate not only how they are used, but what we can learn from studying them critically. I offer reasons why it is important to include these visual texts in a meaningful analysis of escort advertising (or any promotion of sex

exchange).

My third objective, through sheer necessity, was then to develop a system of organisation and analysis that would be useful for managing multimodal (Jones, 2012, 2005) polytextual data (Reavey (ed.), 2011) where texts are both verbal and visual and span several sites of display (Jones, 2009).

Explanation of research objectives

While even the most recent studies made mention of the prominence of photographs, few of them made use of the photographs as a source of data, in competition or complementarity to the written texts. As the visual continues to take greater prominence in cultures of

consumption, entertainment, and leisure, the visual text has become more central to meaning making, and the understanding of how meanings are created, conveyed and consumed (Rose, 2007). Continuing to ignore the visual signs and symbols that are used in small ads and profiles disregards a rich data source, and in doing so, fails to accurately or reliably capture the messages that we are intending to study (Bryman, 2004). However, studying a

combination of written text and visual images has presented its own challenges, which I outline below.

Challenges of polytextual data

Additionally, inclusion of advertising from the internet meant an exponential increase in the amount of data and the format of the data. With current functions for user-generated-content, even uniformly formatted profiles can now include 25 separate photographs, paragraphs of text, video clips, hyperlinks, and music soundtracks that play automatically when the profile is viewed. Now, as much as ever before, the media is the message! In the initial stages, I first adopted a diachronic approach to trace the advertisements from short, verbal print ads in the 1990s to multi-media online profiles in the second decade of the 21^st century. Doing this required a multimodal, or polytextual, approach which allowed me to collect, organise, code and analyse ‘texts’ as paragraphs, single words, telephone numbers, digital and print

photographs, as well as their framing devices. My fear – and it was well-founded – was that the data available would be immense and unmanageable. Indeed, one of my challenges was to find methods to analyse – but first simply to organise – advertisements that were diverse in their media, their form and their content. When I began to collect the data in 2008, the limitations to the capacity and interface of accessible software solutions were prohibitive.

Software designed for qualitative data collection and analysis was unable to store or navigate images and file sizes with the level of detail in whole pages of classified advertisements with

colour photos. That software has improved dramatically but maintains a format that emphasises the verbal as well as more deductive and reductive approaches to analysis.

Field work and the archives

With kind permission from the managing director at Boyz magazine, I used their archived collection that includes every issue of the magazine since it was first published in 1991. I was allowed to visit their offices for the first two days of the week after each edition was

published, when the offices were quietest and my presence would cause the least disruption.

This gave me the added benefit of spending time with some of the magazine’s editorial and layout staff, asking questions, and observing the magazine from organisational and

operational perspectives. Some people were very interested in the work I was doing. They asked me questions and shared their own stories about the magazine’s history and their own experiences and remembrances. Where I thought I was being intrusive, in fact, one staff member chastised me for not asking more from him (Field Notes).