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    Uncovering Interwar Comics: The Challenge of Labeling Graphics in Belgian Weekly Magazines

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    Main article (15.63Mb)
    Authors
    Vercruysse, Bas
    Birkholz, Julie M.
    Crucifix, Benoît
    Dejasse, Erwin
    Hermans, Sébastien
    Thirukokaranam Chandrasekar, Krishna Kumar
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    Discipline
    Humanities
    Languages and Literature
    Arts
    Audience
    Scientific
    Date
    2025
    Metadata
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    Description
    Comics in Belgian weekly magazines remain understudied due to their fragmentary presence and the challenges of retrieval within large periodical collections. While comics are crucial artifacts of visual culture, their marginal status in general-interest magazines and their multimodal nature hinder both their discoverability and scholarly analysis. This article addresses the need for systematic identification of comics in mass-digitized archives by developing a semi-automatic detection workflow grounded in computer vision and object detection techniques. Drawing on a representative corpus of six general-interest illustrated magazines published in Belgium between 1934 and 1940, the study applies a distant viewing approach using YOLO models to detect and label comics alongside related visual categories such as cartoons, photographs, and advertisements. The methodology combines expert-driven annotation, collaborative labeling with weighted majority voting, and model evaluation to fine-tune visual classification. Our results highlight the conceptual and technical complexities of defining comics computationally, the importance of contextual metadata, and the benefits of hierarchical and iterative model training. The proposed workflow not only enhances access to hidden visual materials in historical magazines but also contributes to broader discussions on the remediation of cultural heritage collections and the role of computational methods in comics studies.
    Citation
    Vercruysse, Bas; Birkholz, Julie M.; Crucifix, Benoît; Dejasse, Erwin; Hermans, Sébastien; Thirukokaranam Chandrasekar, Krishna Kumar (2025). Uncovering Interwar Comics: The Challenge of Labeling Graphics in Belgian Weekly Magazines. , DH Benelux Journal, Vol. 7, 137-160, ISSN: 2666-6952, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17648380.
    Identifiers
    issn: 2666-6952
    uri: https://orfeo.belnet.be/handle/internal/14472
    publisherlink: https://journal.dhbenelux.org/volume-7-breaking-silos/
    doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17648380
    Type
    Article
    Peer-Review
    Yes
    Language
    eng
    Links
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