Lecture | LUCDH Lunch Lecture
Changing Without Changing: The visual development of advertising in colonial Korea's newspapers, 1910-1945
- Date
- Tuesday 13 October 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Digital Lab, Huizinga 0.09
Changing Without Changing: The visual development of advertising in colonial Korea's newspapers, 1910-1945
Between 1910 and 1945 the advertising columns of colonial Korea's newspapers were increasingly filled with drawn lettering and pictures. Yet the advertisements of individual firms mostly did not change. I examine 600,000 advertisements from three Seoul daily newspapers in order to trace this change. This is done through a computational approach using a combination of an object detector, a vision-language model, and a pairwise regression model. The result is a score of how elaborate each advertisement looked. Followed firm by firm, I show how the growth in design came with new firms, while established advertisers kept the look of their first year.
All welcome to join
No need to register, join us in the Digital Lab, Huizinga 0.09, or email us for the online link: digital-lab@hum.leidenuniv.nl