This scale aims to visualize and hierarchize the gradual types of advertisements borders in the Shanghai-baed British newspaper North China Daily News between 1914-1949. Five scales have been designed, one per sample issue (Jan 7, 1914; Jan 3, 1924; Jan 5, 1934; Feb 1, 1941; Jan 1, 1949). Each type border is illustrated - or better said, "embodied" - by a concrete example extracted from our samples.

The "Y" axis indicates the nature of the border, from plain/simple border to the most ornamental/sophisticated frame. The "X" axis measures the thickness of borders, on a scale divided into three main graduations:

• Open space (0): no border at all (blue);
• Boundary (1): a permeable kind of border, akin to the threshold type, allowing exhanges and circulations, and playing as a connective rather than separative line (green);
• Border (2): an impenetrable frontier, designed to protect and isolate advertisements from their neighborhood (red).

This gradual typology was freely inspired by E. Casey in his reply to P. Ethington's project of "Placing history". Source: Casey, Edward, ‘Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History’, Rethinking History, 11 (2007), 507–12.

N.B. The number associated to each fragment of border refered to the advertisement ID (when the advertisement is available in the menu "Press Ads").

For a precise measuring of the relative importance of each type of border, see: http://madspace.org/cooked/Graphs?ID=216.

For an attempt to correlate border to page density: http://madspace.org/cooked/Graphs?ID=217. 

For an attempt to correlate border to page location:  http://madspace.org/cooked/Graphs?ID=218.