AZ Ads (1918-1937)

This little 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 provide a unique perspective on what can only be described a period of upheaval, in Vienna as much as elsewhere. They reflect post-war labour shortages, galloping inflation, economic recovery, banking crises and political struggles.

How did we do this?

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. We processed all the 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. This is most pronounced for the last years of the issues (1934-1937), which were printed illegally and in exile and as such do not contain ads.