Corsaren: Multimodal Storytelling in Nineteenth Century Danish Satire

This paper presents a first computational study of the Danish satirical weekly Corsaren (1840–1855), a key publication from Europe’s “golden age of caricature”. Satire in Corsaren emerges from the interplay of text and image, requiring readers to navigate shifting layers of critique, irony, and visual metaphor. We approach the journal as an intermedial narrative form, and address in this paper two initial steps towards anchoring image and text in Corsaren to understand how satire is conveyed. We do that through a lexical and semantic analysis of Corsaren's text using text classification tasks, and through an exploration of Corsaren's illustrations using image clusters.