Libraly Journal

Libraly Journal ›› 2021, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (3): 96-102.

• DIGITAL HUMANITIES • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Semantic Labeling of Advertising Images in Newspapers of the Republic of China Period: Illustrated by Shaoxing Opera Advertisement Published in Xinwen Bao

Yang Jiaying, Xu Xin   

  • Online:2021-03-25 Published:2021-03-25

Abstract: The rise of the newspaper in the 20th century reflected the prosperity of Shanghai’s commerce and culture where advertisement about cultural activities played an important role. A number of such old materials have been photocopied and published online by Shanghai Library at Cnbksy.com. However, it is often difficult to reveal information content contained in image resources via meta-data descriptions. Further utilization is thus restricted.Shaoxing Opera, the most popular drama in Shanghai, is one of the intangible cultural heritages of China, of which newspaper advertising is too old-fashioned to attract much attention on large-scale social labeling or machine labeling. Inheritance and dissemination are two major needs of intangible cultural heritages, where image plays a key role in reflecting the connotation of resources and satisfying the needs of users.In this paper, newspaper advertisement from 1923 to 1949 of Shaoxing Opera was selected as subjects. It combines the semantic model and the techniques of IIIF to reveal the text information covered by the images more accurately. It is helpful for humanities scholars to make better use of the advertising resources of old newspapers, and is beneficial to the spread of intangible cultural heritages culture.