Issues in Subject Analysis and Description of Political Cartoons

Abstract

Political cartoons have historically been organized for very narrow and specific purposes when they have been organized at all. Collections to date have been of the works of a particular artist/writer, or have been collected to illustrate a particular historical event, mostly from times long past. The advent of the Electronic Age has given rise to far more expansive collections, sometimes bringing together in one source several authors who write on a large number of subjects across local, national, and international lines. However, the relative explosion in the number of political cartoon archives in electronic form has not brought about a corresponding rise in systems of organization for the cartoons. The development of a metadata system for political cartoons and other images of meaning would be a benefit for several communities, including political science, history, communications, art history, and those researchers in any field who are working with other specific subsets of images.