Image and Text in Numbers - Uni Siegen · image and text in numbers layout analysis of hispanic...

IMAGE AND TEXT IN NUMBERSLAYOUT ANALYSIS OF HISPANIC CULTURAL MAGAZINES IN MODERNITY

ECODICOLOGY-CONFERENCE "RESEARCH OF WRITTEN DOCUMENTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE" 22/23 FEB 2016 (TU DARMSTADT) -

PD DR. NANETTE RIßLER-PIPKA

THE IDEA –

EVOLUTION OF MODERN AESTHETICS IN CULTURAL MAGAZINES

In Modernity (ca. 1850-1945) aesthetics are profoundly changing:

due to „new“ media like photography and film

due to new concepts of perception like Baudelaire („Le peintre de la vie moderne“,

1863)

and later Benjamin („The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, 1935)

Observation of this change in Spanish and Hispanic cultural magazines –

cultural magazines give as a kind of news media a fast reproduction of aesthetical

changes



THE IDEA –

MODERN AESTHETICS IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

Different aesthetic movements in Spain and Latin America – in contrast

to the rest of Europe and the US

1. Modernism as a literary and aesthetic movement is initiated by Rubén Darío in

1888 (with his volume of poems „Azul“) coming from Nicaragua to Spain and

France via cultural magazines

2. 1898 Spain suffered from a historical crisis due to the loss of their last colonies

Effect was the need of redefinition of Spanish national identity also in

relation to former colonies in Latin America



THE IDEA –

ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

Dissemination of artistic movements around the turn of century

1. Modernism, Generation 1898, Creationism (creacionismo), Ultraist movement

(ultraísmo), Generation 1927, Surrealism (Dalí, Buñuel, Gómez de la Serna)

2. Influenced, but also opposed to known European movements like Dadaism, Futurism

and Surrealism



THE DIFFICULTY –

PRECISE DEFINITION OF EACH MODERN ARTISTIC MOVEMENT

Particularly for Spain and Latin America, dissemination of movements and

personnel overlaps make them difficult to define

1. Editors, authors, artists are contributing to several cultural magazines representing

several artistic movements





http://revistasedp.edaddeplata.org/#546-persona

Example:

Ramón Gómez de la Serna

(1888-1963) known for the

greguerias – a new surrealist

literary genre of humourist

aphorisms

Contributed to 5 „grupos“

(here defined as „vanguardia“,

„futurismo“, „tertulias“)

Contributed to 47 different

cultural magazines in Spain and

Latin America

http://revistasedp.edaddeplata.org/#546-persona

THE HYPOTHESES –

EVOLUTION OF MODERN AESTHETICS IN CULTURAL MAGAZINES

Research questions:

1. Is there a chronological or rather synchronic evolution in history of cultural

magazines?

2. Is there an evolution from the „book“ look-a-like magazine to the avant-garde-

magazine?

3. What are the visual characteristics for a general change / for the different artistic

movements / for the different subgenres e.g. literary magazines, lifestyle magazines,

etc.





Different aesthetics of layout 1/2

La Gaceta Literaria, Madrid 1928 Ciencias y letras, Guayaquil 1912 Revista de Quito, Quito 1898 Ilustración peruana, Lima 1909



Different aesthetics of layout 2/2

Caballo Verde, Madrid 1935 Colibri, Buenos Aires 1925 Octubre, Madrid 1933 Ultra, Madrid 1921

LAYOUT ANALYSIS – HYPOTHESIS

Basic characteristics of layout: quantity of text and image

1. Gives indications about the relation between image and text:

2. Does more text mean that text is more important? Does it indicate a subgenre like

literary magazine? Does it indicate more traditional aesthetics? How does it

correspond to the expressed aesthetic program of the magazine?

3. Is there an evolution from more text/less image to more image/less text in the

course of time?



LAYOUT ANALYSIS – MANUALLY

EL HOGAR (1925)



LAYOUT ANALYSIS – MANUALLY

EL HOGAR (1925, 11. SEPT.)



What can we observe by looking at the layout of one issue of a cultural magazine?

1. Title page never says much about the entire layout of the magazine: here the title represents a luxury and colourful painting, but the inside represents a rather traditional black and white printing

2. In this case more images mean more advertising in the magazine

3. Image and text tend to overlap and are freely arranged – without being disturbing in an artistic sense

4. Typography is elegant and traditional: typographic experiments are found in advertising only

THE PROBLEM –

INDIVIDUAL LAYOUT OF EVERY SINGLE PAGE

The problem is:

1. For one issue of one magazine the detection of layout in a quantitative sense (how

much texts and images are represented, how are they related and arranged?) might

be possible, but for more…

2. We want to collect retraceable metadata for each single page of our digital

collection



QUANTITY OF TEXT AND IMAGE FOR

A COLLECTION OF 23 CULTURAL MAGAZINES

Corpus of the „Revistas culturales“-project: www.revistas-culturales.de

1. Corpus is provided by the Ibero-American Institute (IAI, Berlin): currently 23 titles of magazines, that means about 22,400 single pages

2. Hispanic cultural magazines of the period from 1869-1931 published in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and Cuba

3. Spanish cultural magazines are missing and the corpus does not claim to be representative for all Hispanic cultural magazines (well researched magazines like El Hogar (Argentina, 1904-1958) and Amauta (Peru, 1926-1930) and less known magazines like La Revista de Quito (Ecuador, 1898))



http://www.revistas-culturales.de/

DIGITAL COLLECTION OF HISPANIC CULTURAL MAGAZINES EMBEDDED IN A VRE





The VRE allows

participants of a research

network to annotate

manually each page of the

digital collection.

The manual collection of

metadata by „crowd-

sourcing“ is not very

successful because of

missing „crowd“…

AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS –

TESTED FOR HISPANIC CULTURAL MAGAZINES – AN EXPERIMENT

Automatic Layout Analysis might be a solution…

1. Thanks to a cooperation with „eCodicology“, the tool CodiHub (Chandna et al.

2015) was adapted to work with some examples of pages from our corpus

2. As features to be extracted, we defined simply „text“ and „image“

3. First the data had to be transferred to KIT (Ibero-American Institute as the owner

of the digital collection approved the transfer: Thanks!)




TESTED FOR HISPANIC CULTURAL MAGAZINES – AN EXPERIMENT

Automatic Layout Analysis – the procedure…

4. Swati Chandna (Thank you!) tested the tool on 6 pages of the magazine El Hogar

(1919)

5. Details regarding the functionality and the implementation of the tool will be

presentented tomorrow by the eCodicology-team…




6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR – THE ORIGINAL POSITION




6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR – THE TEXT SEGMENTATION




6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR – THE PICTURE SEGMENTATION



TABLE OF RESULTS: MEASUREMENTS FOR TEXTUAL PARTS,

FOR PAGE 5 (FRAGMENT)


REDUCTION OF COMPLEXITY

How to „read“ one million numbers? – Reduction of data-entries

1. The exact measurement of each page, produces numbers and new images (see the

page, text and image segmentation and calibration) as metadata, that can be stored,

retraced and analysed

2. For a first analysis as reduction of complexity, we selected only the biggest values in

every table of measurement :



TABLE OF RESULTS: MEASUREMENTS FOR TEXTUAL AND IMAGE PARTS,

FOR PAGE 3, ONLY BIGGEST VALUES CONSIDERED (FRAGMENT)

CONCLUSION

Manual Layout Analysis

Many different characteristics (features) and context information can be taken into consideration

Looking at all pages of one issue at once gives an overview at one glance

Problem: not realizable for the whole corpus

The reasons for classification are difficult to re-trace, no metadata generated

Automatic Layout Analysis

Can be used in the exact same way for the

whole corpus

Metadata is generated for each page, can

be used for further (statistic) analysis

Analysis might show if there is an evolution

in the history of cultural magazines or not

Challenge: difficult to handle for literary

scholars – cooperation necessaryECODICOLOGY-CONFERENCE "RESEARCH OF WRITTEN DOCUMENTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE" 22/23 FEB 2016 (TU DARMSTADT) -


Image and Text in Numbers - Uni Siegen · image and text in numbers layout analysis of hispanic...

Documents

Transcript of Image and Text in Numbers - Uni Siegen · image and text in numbers layout analysis of hispanic...