Its taken a long time to get here.

Well last week I was author on another paper. This time on Food Messages in women's magazines since 1950-2000. It was a study I first got involved in back in about 2006/7 when the second author had collected the data. There were problems as the frequency of adverts was different over the decades so 10 adverts talking about cheese in 1955 was not the same as 10 adverts talking about cheese in 1995.  The question was how did you adjust for the changing rates of adverts.

Well it has been through a variety of states since then. The first author presented the results several times at public lectures and conferences but publication kept getting put off. It was also connected with another paper which looked far more closely at the messages about food given during the war. Together they showed the ways that different attitudes to food have been shown through advertising and other elements of women's magazines. The concentration of people getting enough calories in the 1950s would seem very odd in today society which is worries about an obesity epidemic.

Of course the idea would have been to have got this published around 2008, but it has taken to 2013. Each time we have returned to the data we have refined the analysis. We started comparing all data to 2000s but we only had five years of data for that compared to the other decades when we had ten. So we switched to using the 1950s as our baseline. We selected carefully what topics for advertising were shown to get those which made a coherent story across more than one type and to remove the categories which were very sparse. Finally we dropped the 2000s altogether and just concentrated on those before hand.

One real nightmare was getting the graphs out. The analysis was done in SPSS, but that is a hopeless package for presentation graphs. Initially they were done in Excel (which is better) but then they would not come in good enough quality so we had the job of getting better quality. Late nights trying to get them to work. Sigmaplot is only marginally better and I am on the look out for a piece of software that does academic plots well. At the moment I am seriously considering learning to use some of the very specialist packages that come R perhaps ggplot2. The thing is you need to draw quite specific plots, give precise labels often using symbols and then you need to produce them as a high quality graphic.

Its out now, so onto something new.