Melvin Wevers is a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Humanities Group of the KNAW Humanities Cluster in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his research, he combines techniques from text mining and computer vision to study cultural-historical phenomena. His PhD research focused on the representation of the United States in Dutch public discourse on consumer goods.
Jesper Verhoef, PhD, is a lecturer at Delft University of Technology. He obtained his PhD in Cultural History at Utrecht University. In his dissertation, entitled ‘Contested modernization. America and Dutch identity in public discourse on media, 1919-1989’, he applied various digital techniques.
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This article analyses advertisements to shed light on the ways in which the Coca-Cola Company tried to shape the Dutch perception of an American way of life, and by extension provided the discursive building blocks for the construction of a mental map of America. Since the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) digitized its newspaper collection, we could analyze newspapers using both computational and traditional means. The central question this article addresses is: Did Coca-Cola advertisements in Dutch newspapers communicate themes that represented the American way of life? Using two separate workflows, we demonstrate how we combined computational and traditional methods in an iterative and transparent manner. These workflows are systematic descriptions of how we used computational tools to answer this paper’s central research question.
This article analyses advertisements to shed light on the ways in which the Coca-Cola Company tried to shape the Dutch perception of an American way of life and provided the discursive building blocks for the construction of a mental map of America
In 1938, the American newspaper editor William Allen White famously described
Coca-Cola as the sublimated essence of all
that America stands for — a decent thing, honestly made, universally
distributed, conscientiously improved with the years
export served as a more potent
symbol of the American way of life than Coke
ironclad vehicles of an
American way of life.
He argues that they need to be studied as
indeterminate signifiers
within their local context separated from
their original U.S. context
The specific interpretation of an iconic brand such as Coca-Cola within a
national context can, according to Douglas Holt, reveal the collective anxieties and desires of
a nation
the best barometer of the
relationship with the US
The United States had a strong cultural, economic, and political presence in the
Netherlands throughout the twentieth century. The Dutch perception of this
American presence vacillated between bouts of anti-Americanism and
pro-Americanism. In the interwar period (1919-1939), as American cultural
products such as movies appeared in the Netherlands, Dutch interest in American
culture grew, despite anti-Americanism voiced by intellectuals such as Johan
Huizinga the attention of the Dutch
population was actively focused on America, the new model
country
reject American mass culture, even
as they attacked the excesses of consumerism
We analyzed advertisements to shed light on the ways in which the Coca-Cola
Company shaped the Dutch perception of an American way of life, and by extension
provided the discursive building blocks for the construction of a mental map of
America fully reflects the spirit of the
past, [as it] indicates development of certain industries, but also
covers all aspects of cultural and social life
advertisers also communicated
broader assumption about social values
consumption as a way of
life
The application of computational methods in humanities research has led to fierce
debates. These frequently focus on the practice of distant reading
the archive from a
distance
the automated search for
patterns
synergistic interaction
by ‘rapid shuttling’ between
quantitative information and hermeneutic close reading
work (…). So let’s talk
about this work, in action, this actually existing work
Within the field of cultural history, relatively few examples of actual digital
historical research have appeared potential,
promise,
and possibilities
to address the prospects of digital
techniques, Cameron Blevins maintains, historians talk the talk, but rarely walk
the walk. Therefore, he urges historians to practice what they preach and start
the creation of, interaction with,
and interpretation of data must become more integral to historical
writing
This article takes these pleas to heart. By means of two separate workflows, we demonstrate how we combined computational and traditional methods in an iterative and transparent manner. These workflows are systematic descriptions of how we used computational tools to answer this paper’s central research question. Workflow A (Figure 1) describes how n-gram analysis and full-text searching are apt methods to construct a sub-corpus from a larger corpus of textual data. Used in combination with close reading of specific documents, these methods guide the construction of a sub-corpus. Subsequently, workflow B (Figure 2) lays out how we explored a sub-corpus using AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit. Workflow B offers various strands of analytical information derived from distant reading and shows how they directed close reading. In answering the research question, we constantly moved back and forth between these modes of analysis.
Before being able to answer whether advertisements linked Coca-Cola to an
American way of life, it is necessary to answer the following questions. Did the
Coca-Cola Company advertise Coca-Cola in Dutch newspapers? If so, when and how
frequently? Answering these kinds of descriptive questions has changed
considerably with the advent of n-gram viewers and full-text searching as
instruments to query digitized archives. Researchers can now use single or
strings of keywords to trace specific words or concepts without having to
manually browse through the archive to find them (e.g.
In our research the use of an n-gram viewers served two principal functions. First, it helped to quickly locate specific words in a corpus, which aided the construction of our sub-corpus. By inputting keywords in an n-gram viewer, the tool produced an instant overview of the frequency of words in the corpus relative to the total number of words in one year within the corpus. The graphs generated by n-gram viewers enabled us to compare and trace n-grams to pinpoint continuities and discontinuities in language. This made the mapping of ideas, practices, and products within digitized sources more comprehensive and rigorous.
The KB n-gram viewer offered a quick way to establish whether and when Dutch
newspapers wrote about Coca-Cola.Coca-Cola
, Coca Cola
, and Cola
.Coca-Cola
first appeared in this corpus in 1928.Coca-Cola
. Coca-Cola
decreased and
Coca Cola
sharply increased. Cola
increased in tandem with
Coca Cola
, which coincided with the growing popularity of soft drinks
in the Netherlands. In 1958, soft drink consumption in the Netherlands was ten
liters per capita. By 1968, this number had drastically increased up to fifty
liters per capita
Secondly, we used the KB n-gram viewer to compare the relative occurrence of
different consumer goods, which added context to the prevalence of Coca-Cola
(cf.
(coffee) and
(beer) shows that coverage of these consumer
goods eclipsed that of Coca-Cola. This suggests that Coca-Cola was not a staple
good, whereas beer and coffee were.
The information gathered from the visualizations produced by the KB n-gram
viewer necessitated critical interpretation. First, this particular viewer does
not offer the option to distinguish between colonial and non-colonial Dutch
newspapers, nor can users discriminate articles from advertisements.
After roughly establishing when and how often newspapers mentioned Coca-Cola,
we turned to full-text searching to assemble a sub-corpus of Coca-Cola
advertisements. We used the text mining tool Texcavator to query the
digitized newspaper corpus. This tool was developed as part of the research
project Translantis
The first step in locating Coca-Cola advertisements involved determining
whether Coca-Cola actually advertised in Dutch national and regional
newspapers. Searching for Coca-Cola
yielded numerous advertisements.
These were not only advertisements for Coca-Cola, but also for the soft
drink brands Fanta and Sprite. The Coca-Cola Company also produced these
drinks and was therefore mentioned.
The refined search query found 2,905 advertisements in regional and national
newspapers published between 1890 and 1990. In the same period, 4,517
advertisements contained Cola
without mentioning
Coca-Cola
.Coca-Cola
and 0,040% Cola
. This shows that Coca-Cola was
the most dominant Cola brand, but in relation to the overall advertising
corpus the ads for Coca-Cola formed a relatively small portion.
The timelines in Figure 5 show the absolute and relative annual frequency of
Coca-Cola advertisements.
Contextualizing these results by close reading shows that the majority of
advertisements in the 1970s consisted of job ads by the Coca-Cola Company or
advertisements authored by others, such as supermarket chains.experience
(wage
(education
(
The analysis underlying this workflow consisted of three steps. First, we set out to establish whether the Coca-Cola Company explicitly linked Coca-Cola to the United States. Next, we used AntConc to discern two central themes in Coca-Cola advertisements. Lastly, we examined to what extent these themes signified an American way of life.
We looked at the co-occurrence of references to the United States and
Coca-Cola to determine whether the Coca-Cola Company related its leading
drink to the United States. When calculating the frequency of these
co-occurrences, we used context words and a context horizon — two
functionalities offered by AntConc. Context words are words that must appear
within a set distance — a context horizon — to the search word. We set this
distance to ten words to the right and ten to the left of a search word. In
our case the context words included different ways of referring to the
United States as expressed by the search query: coca?cola
.ameri?a*
, vereenigde staten
,
verenigde staten
, usa
, u.s.a.
, and united
states
.
We used context words and a context horizon for two reasons. First, the OCR
software did not always correctly compartmentalize the advertisements in the
newspaper corpus during digitization. Especially in the case of classified
ads, the software grouped multiple ads as one single advertisement Coca-Cola
and
America
appeared in the actual newspapers in two separate
advertisements, whereas after digitization, they were indexed as one single
advertisement. A context horizon required the search word and the context
words to be in close proximity, which reduced faulty results produced by
composite advertisements in which the search word and context words would
often be further apart.
Secondly, the co-occurrence of two words does not necessarily indicate a
relationship between them; it merely suggests the possibility of a
relationship. By setting a context horizon, we only looked for references to
America in the proximity of Coca-Cola
. The proximity we selected is a
good indicator of a semantic relationship between words
Using the context words and the context horizon, AntConc yielded not a single
document in which Coca-Cola and a reference to the United States
co-occurred. As this was an unanticipated result, we established whether
coca-cola
co-occurred with america
in advertisements
without being in each other’s proximity. This was the case in fifty-one
advertisements. We did a close reading of these advertisements, which
corroborated that the Coca-Cola Company did not explicitly advertise
Coca-Cola as an American product. It also confirmed that most of the
co-occurrences resulted from grouped advertisements, or from advertisements
in which the words were unrelated. This verified the advantages of setting a
context horizon and using context words.
A full-text search for the phrase amerikaanse cola
amerikaansche cola
american cola
cola uit amerika
).
Overall, searching for co-occurrences offered an inkling of possible trends
in the corpus, in this case that the Coca-Cola Company did not explicitly
associate Coca-Cola with America or the United States. Moreover, these
searches also ruled out that advertisers used the phrase the American way
of life.
If Coca-Cola advertisements depicted an American way of
life, or referred to the United States, they did so in implicit terms or
through visual content.
In the next step of the analysis, we examined whether Coca-Cola
advertisements included themes that might symbolize an American way of life.
For this purpose, we used AntConc’s clustering, concordancing, collocation,
and word frequency functionalities. We used clustering to detect common
phrases that contain specific keywords. Collocation was used to look for
words that co-occurred within a specified context horizon
In order to keep track of possible changes within advertising discourse, we
divided the sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements into four ten-year
periods: 1928-1937 (n = 220), 1938-1947 (n = 53), 1948-1957 (n = 372), and
1958-1967 (n = 414). Collocation analysis demonstrated that the relatively
small set of advertisements between 1938 and 1947 contained no collocates
that were of historical relevance. Therefore, our analysis focused on
1928-1937, 1948-1957, and 1958-1967.
From the list of collocates from all three periods, we discerned two themes: the drink’s international and local connotation of the drink, and Coca-Cola’s refreshing and invigorating taste.
The first element in Coca-Cola advertisement was the international character
of the drink, as expressed by the following words: world
,
countries
, and international
.
,
, and
.Coca-Cola quickly conquered the
entire world. In Europe, Coca-Cola is the most beloved drink in all the
trendsetting places.
In addition to the drink’s global character, advertisers tied the drink to
the Netherlands. They did so by mentioning the Dutch bottling companies in
advertisements. Words such as bottler,
to bottle,
Amsterdam,
Schiedam,
Scheveningen,
and local
situated Coca-Cola within a local
context.
,
,
,
,
,
and
.local
nature of franchises when
they claimed that everywhere bottling and distribution of Coca-Cola is a
local enterprise.
the Coke bottle is not only known all over the world, it is also of local importance,which further underlines the entanglement of the global and local.
Advertisers not only mentioned the locations of bottling plants, they also linked Coca-Cola to Dutch towns, such as Scheveningen, Amsterdam, and Leeuwarden. In 1928, the regional newspaper
Amsterdam and Coca-Cola belonged together!
The Coca-Cola Company acquainted many Dutch consumers in the 1950s and 1960s
with a product with a uncanny ability (…) to be
everywhere and nowhere at the same time: omnipresent globally, but
territorially deterritorialized
The second theme that dominated Coca-Cola advertisements was its taste. This became most explicit in advertisements published between 1928-1937 and 1958-1967.
In the interwar period, advertisements described Coca-Cola’s taste as
fine
, delicious
and distinct
.taste
:
(n =
56),
(n = 44), and
(n = 41).
(144 / 65,44),
(16 / 7.27),
(16 / 7.27),
(11 / 5), and
’ (25 / 11.36).Coca-Cola bubbles in your glass,
Coca-Cola is deliciously refreshing,
and Coca-Cola’s fizzes and
bubbles.
(6),
(6), and
(4).
Overall, the description of Coca-Cola’s taste did not seem to change
drastically between the two periods. Not surprisingly, in both periods the
Coca-Cola Company presented their product as delicious and one of a kind.
There was, however, another striking characteristic associated with
Coca-Cola’s taste: its ability to refresh and invigorate. In the period
1958-1967, invigorating
collocated significantly to Coca-Cola
and taste
.taste
:
(26 / 5.90). Collocate to
Coca-Cola
:
(10 / 2.7). how invigorating that tingling sparkle.
in
In addition to the drink’s ability to stimulate the consumer, the Coca-Cola
Company claimed the drink could — rather paradoxically — also relax the
consumer. In one of the first Coca-Cola advertisements in Dutch newspapers,
Coca-Cola was associated with leisure time.rest, relaxation, and new
energy.
By focusing on relaxation, the advertisements also highlighted its
counterpart: stress. The advertisements chiefly situated stress within the
context of people at work in the office or homemakers doing their chores.
Figure 7 shows how advertisements instructed consumers to stop rushing
for a minute! Your nerves will quiet down and all tension will
disappear.
Moreover, Coca-Cola advertisements informed Dutch consumers that stress and
relaxation were part of a modern lifestyle. The Coca-Cola Company claimed
that the drink’s ability to stimulate led to its popularity and turned it
into a drink cherished by modern people.
Another distinctive element of the modern consumer was that both males and
female could drink Coca-Cola whenever and with whomever.sparkling refreshment
and unchanging quality
caused people of all ages and in all settings
to consume the drink.during work
, during dinner
, during sports and
play
, and drank by young and old
demonstrate that the
Coca-Cola Company set out to make the drink accessible for everyone.
,
,
, and
.
This image is what scholars such as Richard Pells, T. Jackson Lears, and
Charles McGovern describe as an American way of life. Additionally, Victoria
de Grazia argues that many American products available in Europe focused on
the democratization of consumer goods
By means of advertisements, the Coca-Cola Company injected specific elements
into the Dutch public consciousness that shaped how the Dutch viewed the
American way of life. These elements also resonated within Dutch advertising
discourse for other American products, such as cigarettes
This article has shown that the Coca-Cola Company advertised Coca-Cola in
newspapers between 1928 and 1970, with the majority of advertisements published
between 1950 and 1965. In these advertisements, Coca-Cola was not explicitly
presented as an American brand. Coca-Cola’s link to the United States was much
more implicit. Using corpus analysis tools, we have established that an
important feature in Coca-Cola’s brand identity was its taste and its
international character. Dutch Coca-Cola advertisements unmistakably linked the
taste of Coca-Cola to refreshment and invigoration. Furthermore, instead of
presenting itself as an American brand, the Coca-Cola Company accentuated
Coca-Cola’s international and local character, a phenomenon described as
While ads for Coca-Cola never explicitly mentioned the American way of life,
they exposed Dutch consumers to a lifestyle characterized by consumption; a
lifestyle often described as an American way of life. Ads provided Dutch
consumers with a more symbolic representation of the lifestyle characterized by
consumption. The expression of an American way of life in Coca-Cola
advertisements manifested on two different levels. First, the advertisements
depicted a modern, urban lifestyle — a simulacrum of the burgeoning American
consumer society at the time. The second expression of an American way of life
took shape in the way advertisers addressed consumers. Consumers in Coca-Cola
advertisements could be either male or female, and they were depicted being
engaged in activities of leisure or work. Coca-Cola represented elements of an
American way of life while at the same time its global spread disassociated the
product from its actual origins. This fits within what Rob Kroes calls a
resemanticization of reality in which American life is turned into an imaginary realm to be experienced
by those who bought a product
Further analyses of advertisements of other consumer goods can shed light on the ways in which advertising discourse as a whole shaped Dutch perceptions of the United States and the American way of life. Moreover, by incorporating newspapers articles, researchers can examine how advertising discourse corresponded with public debates on consumer goods, consumerism, and the United States. This kind of comparative analysis has become more feasible with the availability of computational tools and the proliferation of digitized archives.
In addition to answering a cultural-historical research question, this article has demonstrated the practical implications of combining traditional and computational methods. By means of two workflows, we have shown how we first constructed a sub-corpus of Coca-Cola advertisements, which we subsequently analyzed using the corpus linguistic toolkit AntConc.
The workflows highlighted how working with computational tools is not a linear
process but requires going back-and-forth between generating output,
interpreting output, and a close reading of the sources. This results in a
combination of distant and close reading that contextualizes results as well as
checks against corpus inadequacies the power of the
particular