(Echelle graduée de la visualité et des écarts à la « copy » idéale)

This "scale of visuality" aims to measure the balance between visual/textual elements on various advertisements extracted from the Shanghai-based British newspaper North China Daily News. It further aims to evaluate their conformity/deviations to the "ideal copy", as it was modelized in contemporary handbooks. Five scales have been drawn for each of our five usual samples (for consistency reasons, the same as those used for the Chinese newspaper Shenbao: Jan 7 1914, Jan 3 1924, Jan 5 1934, Feb 1 1941 and Jan 1 1949). For each graduation are mentioned the types of products they are usually associated with. By juxtapositing the five scales, one is able to compare and trace landscape mutations accross time.

For visibility reasons, the extensive corpora is not represented on each scale. The ads displayed represent but a few extracts of the total ad population. They should be considered as representative example of each type/graduation. Moreover, their actual sizes and proportions could not be respected. They had to be resized to fit in the scale. Last but not least, it was not possible to indicate the precise reference of each ad. Yet the reader could find such references in the "Press Ads" section.