So far, I have been reading Working Women in America which is about the history of women working women, women in everyday jobs and gender inequality in workforce. I also have another book Women’s Magazines 1940-1960 which is about gender roles and the popular press and that will be useful in determining how magazines were structured after World War 2.

I also have been looking up different companies’ ads over different periods and Bureau of Labor statistics. I am trying to find a pattern between different companies in similar times and the statistics on Bureau of Labor. Determining which companies’ ads to use and excluding or including the exceptions are the what I am looking into currently. Jean Kilbourne’s documentary series Killing Us Softly is also a really interesting resource about the ideal image of woman that ads create. Although the documentary series is not about working women and more about the ideal beauty, it is still really helpful and interesting.

Looking at other digital humanities projects, I really like the exhibit on The Archigram Archive Project and I want to have a similar exhibit for the ads I am using in my project. I wanted to make a timeline, but I don’t think timeline will work especially because I will be looking at specific time periods rather than a continuous period. I also feel better about Scalar and I think it will give me a lot of flexibility since I can create different tabs for different things.

I need to start narrowing down my topic, but there are so many interesting resources that I don’t know how to narrow it down. I will read all the research done and documents I found so far within this week and hopefully will come to conclusion.

I still am not sure which time periods to focus on, but I found lot more interesting ads after World War 2 than during the 1970’s; therefore, I will probably focus on ads during World War 2 and maybe a little after, since the later ones display women as housewives whereas the ones during the war portray working women. As for the current ads, there are a lot of controversial ads belonging to 21st century.