IMAGE AND TEXT IN NUMBERS LAYOUT ANALYSIS OF HISPANIC CULTURAL MAGAZINES IN MODERNITY
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
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-gardemagazine? 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))
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 crowdsourcing 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!)
AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS 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
AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS 6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR THE ORIGINAL POSITION
AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS 6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR THE TEXT SEGMENTATION
AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS 6 PAGES OF EL HOGAR THE PICTURE SEGMENTATION
TABLE OF RESULTS: MEASUREMENTS FOR TEXTUAL PARTS, FOR PAGE 5 (FRAGMENT)
AUTOMATIC LAYOUT ANALYSIS 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 Automatic 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 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 necessary