This experience has been amazing and I learned so much about history of women and advertising, different ways advertisements affect our lives and what it means to be a working women in the US. But more importantly, I learned so much about myself and my own interests. After this internship, which gave me the opportunity to delve into the marketing world, I found that marketing is where my love for anthropology and business intersect.

I love my topic and thought my findings were really interesting. I started my research thinking that advertisements reflected the society they were in. As I looked closely to it, I found that there is more to it than the reality. Advertisements are really integral to our daily lives and our opinions on certain issues and through my project, I realized instead of just taking the information in, there is small details we, as a society, need to question. And those small details we don’t really think about set the standards for social ideals and normalize certain situations. Seeing how powerful advertisements are, I am excited to be involved in this industry, knowing that I could make a difference in this world through my contribution in advertising world.

Throughout these 6 weeks, I learned how to be a scholar. I learned the steps in doing a humanities research and that 6 weeks is really a short period of time to do a big project. I have so much more respect for all researchers now. There were a lot of decisions to make and all the small decisions I made were really hard. Before Digital Humanities, I didn’t really realize how every single decision you make shapes and your research in different ways and you have to be really careful with them, think thoroughly about every single one of them. They were all big decisions to me.

Also learning Tableau is another thing I got from this experience and I will show it off whenever I get a chance! I didn’t realize before I got into it how much it is used in business world, including data analysis. I can now confidently say that I know how to use this tool.

Looking back at it, seeing the title Digital Humanities and asking my friend who was a Digital Humanities Scholar last year what it is, getting confused, then talking to Sarah and just being super unfamiliar with all the tools she mentioned… I can say that I developed a sense of familiarity with digital tools now and the field of Digital Humanities.

Everything is becoming digital and adding this digital component to a humanities research enriches the experience. I loved my research, but I also loved building charts and galleries to support my findings. You cannot put 20 pictures on a paper, so having a digital platform to support your research only helps.

During my research, there was times I felt overwhelmed, stressed and rushed. Not knowing which direction to go as I started my research and trying to find a path, reading different articles on different things, talking to other people, all saying different things, trying to find data from all type of different resources… It was an exhausting 6 weeks and I would not be able to finish my project if it wasn’t for the people around me. All the librarians, professors, my fellow DH’ers and Sarah. I loved getting help from people, especially because I am the worst at making decisions, I loved having a variety of different topics and learning about all these different things and just having other people who were going through the same things as I did. And as the assignment says, this is only the beginning of a journey. I only have more questions now and I learned that questions push you to learn more. Next step is that I want to look at representation of minority groups in advertisements, maybe next year or maybe a few years from now. Doing my research, I realized there was barely any representation of women of color in advertisements and that is something I want to look at in future. So it’s not an ending, but only a beginning.