AZ Ads (1918-1937)

This webpage shows a collection of advertisements that appeared in the Austrian Socialist Democratic newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung during the years of Red Vienna (1918-1934). These ads were originally a by-product of a related (ongoing) information retrieval project. It soon became apparent, however, that they are fascinating in their own right, as they function as a microcosm of the societal upheaval Vienna experienced during this period. The effects of post-war labour shortages, galloping inflation, economic recovery, banking crises and political struggle are thus imprinted on the AZ advertisement pages. In times of polycrisis, revisiting such snapshots of daily lives becomes even more relevant.

How was this done?

All newspaper editions were downloaded from ANNO, the Austrian newspaper archive of the Austrian National Library. The ads were extracted by a YOLO (specifically YALTAi) model trained on the newspaper layouts and run on the entirety of issued Arbeiter-Zeitung newspapers between 1918 and 1937.

Are these all the ads?

Sadly, no. The model was applied to all published newspapers in the given time period. However, due to the complexity of the newspaper layout, the model is not able to detect advertisements with 100% accuracy. In order to minimise false positives, only those detected with 80%+ confidence are included here. Even so, you will inevitably stumble upon some false positive detections.

Impressum