Category: all

I.W.W. members accused of sedition for using “stickerettes,” 1917-1918

For the past few years, DJ Alperovitz, an I.W.W. uber-archivist who lives in the Pacific northwest, has very kindly been sending me old newspaper clippings documenting early examples of I.W.W. “stickerettes” or “silent agitators” from such newspapers as Solidarity and Industrial Worker. You can read my essay about the early history of stickerettes, for example, and see a timeline at the links provided here. Up until now, I’ve been focused on finding the earliest examples of political stickers made in the USA. All roads have led to the I.W.W., though I’ve also found some stamps related to women’s suffrage from…

Featured contributor Kevin Howley on Donald Trump sticker(s)

KEVIN HOWLEY (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. He is the author of several books including, most recently, Drones: Media Discourse & The Public Imagination. His research has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, Television & New Media, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism and Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture. In addition to his record of peer-reviewed scholarship, Howley has worked as a community newspaper columnist, radio broadcaster, and video producer. In recent years, his flash fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Quibble, Fauxmoir, and The Ryder Magazine. He is currently working on a…

“Voices of the People” exhibition at Woody Guthrie Center

On view through December 31, 2024, Voices of the People: 110+ Years of Political Stickers from the USA, features hundreds of stickers grouped by themes and dates. Click on an image and save it to a new tab to view stickers more closely. Curator’s statement by Catherine Tedford Publicly placed stickers with printed and hand-drawn images and text have been used for decades for creative expression and as an effective way to engage passersby. Often spotted at eye level or just beyond reach, stickers are hidden in plain sight, gracing every imaginable surface of the built environment—from street signs and…

Book contract for “Paper Bullets”!

I signed a book contract with PM Press last week to publish Paper Bullets: 110+ Years of Political Stickers from around the World! I’ll write the introduction and a few chapters, but I’ve invited several other notable contributors. My contact at PM Press also suggested Lincoln Cushing and Crimethinc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, both of whom I have followed for years. Here is the table of contents to date. Essays will each run 500-1,500 words, depending on the topic, etc.

Cataloguing George W. Bush stickers with ChatGPT 4o

I’m having so much fun using ChatGPT 4o to catalogue political stickers for the Street Art Graphics digital archive in Jstor. Today I catalogued 16 stickers about former President George W. Bush, and the results continue to impress me. Generative AI did an excellent job describing the contents and meaning of each sticker with this prompt: “There are three steps to this prompt. 1) First, in a 150-word summary for a college writing assignment, describe the contents and meaning of this political sticker about U.S. President George W. Bush. Please refer to specific online resources for your response. 2) Second,…

Eight new I.W.W. “silent agitators” + cataloguing with ChatGPT 4o

I recently acquired eight new I.W.W. “silent agitators” or “stickerettes,” bringing my collection up to 86 unique designs. That number is misleading, however, in that some designs are printed in different combinations of red and black ink on cream or red paper. Some designs have the addresses of I.W.W. headquarters listed on them, and some do not, which can help date the stickerettes. The address at 2422 North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60614 dated from April 1933 to February 1970, however, so most of the stickerettes date to that time period. The first stickerette below on red paper is one…

Featured contributor Kevin Howley on Richard Nixon sticker(s)

Kevin Howley (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. His work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination. [Editor’s Note: Kevin was one of the first people to contact me offering to contribute to the Paper Bullets exhibition and book. His original plan was to write about the Richard Nixon “Watergate: The Proof Increases Every day” sticker, but after seeing his final essay, I asked if I could include other Nixon stickers, too.] Watergate: The Proof Increases Everyday, V. Dinnerstein,…

Featured contributor Kevin Howley on George W. Bush sticker(s)

Kevin Howley (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. His work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination. [Editor’s Note: Kevin was one of the first people to contact me offering to contribute to the Paper Bullets exhibition and book. His original plan was to write about the “No Intel Inside” sticker of George W. Bush, but after seeing his final essay, I asked if I could include other Bush stickers, too. I am delighted with how this all turned…

ChatGPT4 to catalogue sociopolitical stickers?

I took a workshop yesterday at SLU where I work on generative AI and dove deep down the rabbit hole. I had gone into the workshop as a casual user of an early version of ChatGPT but came away really impressed with some possibilities for cataloguing sociopolitical stickers in the Street Art Graphics digital image collection. In the workshop, I used the library’s ChatGPT4 version to do a few test runs on stickers and other artworks in the SLU image collections, and here is what I learned. Prompt: I am a university professor. Describe the contents and meaning of this…