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. Post-war labour shortages, galloping inflation, economic recovery, banking crises and political struggle.

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 positive, only those detected with 80%+ confidence are included here. Even so, you will inevitably stumble upon some false positive detections.