This set of bar charts aims to measure the relative importance of the three main types of borders identified in the newspaper Shenbao between 1914-1949, each one associated to a given number and color: 

• 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.

We have only counted the dominant type of border on each page. For an illustrated or more embodied version of this typology, see: http://madspace.org/cooked/Drawings?ID=119.

The measurements were made in our five usual samples of the newspaper Shenbao (Jan 7, 1914 ; Jan 3, 1924 ; Jan 5, 1934 ; Feb 1, 1941 ; Jan 1, 1949).