Reflection 4

I realized that comparing the data to how women are displayed in the advertisements, I cannot make big generalizations about the motives behind creation of ads; therefore, I decided to keep my project as an observational study. Where I am struggling is finding high-quality images of poster ads in the 1940’s from reliable websites. I found a website that categorizes ads by industry and year; however, it is created by a person and not a reliable organization. I am meeting Ana tomorrow to see if she has any suggestions about which resources to use, so I think that will be helpful. I was not able to meet the professors due to summer time and professors not being in their office as often, but I am meeting one of them next week and e-mailing the other one my questions. Hopefully, that will help me settle my topic and what type of data I am using. Also, I decided that I want to focus on fashion, food & beverages and technology industries since they all have different audiences.

Another problem I am facing is finding the data on women’s occupations in the 1940’s. I wanted to compare the data to images in the 1940’s and 2010’s and then compare those two to each other; however, I don’t know if that is going to be feasible due to accessibility of older data. Skimming through internet, I found some data, but I need to look more deeply into it to see if it is trustworthy.

So far, I started playing with Tableau and I figured out how to make simple charts. I will try stepping into more complicated ones and we’ll see how that goes. I also need to figure out how to embed charts into websites like Scalar. I just created a Scalar book, but I haven’t decided on chapter names or anything else yet.

This week I will focus on going through the books I have left and taking notes, trying to create more complex charts on Tableau and find a more reliable website for advertisements from the 1940’s.

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