"A newspaper full of things. Worlds of Goods in the Basel Avisblatt, 1729-1844"
(Dissertation, ongoing)
This study examines the Avisblatt as a platform for the buying, selling, renting and exchanging of consumer goods. The advertisements placed in the Avisblatt refer to potential economic transactions. The project analyzes the consumer goods offered and sought, their distribution and weighting over the entire period under investigation. It is interested in the materials, qualities and prices described in the advertisements. Quantitative analyses of long-term economic cycles are supplemented by thematic-qualitative in-depth studies. A special focus is also placed on second-hand offers and demand. The result is a multi-layered picture of the supply of local, supra-regional and global consumer goods in Basel and their circulation. The Avisblatt serves as a lens through which to examine the developments and dynamics of economic exchange and material culture in Basel and to relate them to the political and social transformation processes of the Sattelzeit. The result is a picture of a development in the history of consumption that differs in a characteristic way from the models that have been developed in research based on the so-called "miracle economies" of north-western Europe.
works on the markets outside the consumer goods market. The labour market in the Avisblatt is mainly aimed at placing apprentices and assistants on the one hand, and servants on the other. Closely linked to this is the advertising of services such as textile and laundry work or offers for boarders, especially by women. Boarding can also be a component of letting offers: The housing market in the Avisblatt, in combination with census data, allows us to study lengths of stay and dynamics of housing in the urban space for the early 19th century, a time of increasing immigration and growing population. Just as the advertising of lotteries presented the readers of the Avisblatt with large sums of money, this also applied to the comprehensive brokerage of mortgage and investment loans by the Avisblatt - here we can observe interest rate trends and changes in the supply and demand for credit.
Long-term fluctuations in the purchasing power and discretionary income of urban households were heavily dependent on the development of prices for basic foodstuffs, as published weekly in the Avisblatt itself. Reconstructing these is an important building block for understanding the long-term change in social structures and living conditions in the city; at the same time, they can be compared with the changing frequency of adverts of different categories in the Avisblatt: What strategies for using the Avisblatt and, in turn, what economic behaviour of households does this suggest?
"Topographies of the Lost. On the practice of losing and finding in the Basler Avisblatt, 1729-1844"
(Master thesis, 2022)
As a platform that appeared weekly in Basel from 1729, the Avisblatt provided Basel residents with the opportunity to advertise lost items for sale, loan requests and job offers and to restitute found items in return for a reward. These lost and found adverts, typical of intelligence journals, are the focus of this master's thesis. It was written as part of the SNSF-funded project "Markets on Paper" and utilised the digital infrastructure developed there for a quantitative longitudinal study with qualitative in-depth drilling. In addition to focussing on questions of deviance, the work uses a consumption-historical perspective to examine the (fashion) cycles of lost and found objects. Last but not least, the spaces mentioned in loss adverts provide insights into the everyday urban mobility of individual actors.
is working on the pietistic publishing family, the economic context of the advertising paper in early capitalist Basel, vital statistics as pre-statistical elements in the Avisblatt between moral discourse and political arithematics, and the paper's function as an urban institution of memory.
She has led the project since 2018.
works on the book adverts in the Avisblatt and on the church seats offered for sale or exchange. Books are a special object in the range of goods on offer, as not only private sellers but also professional sellers advertised their offers throughout the entire publication period. By comparing the individual titles advertised with other databases such as the index of 18th century prints published in German-speaking countries (VD18), the books on offer can be enriched with additional metadata and used for further analyses.
The regularly advertised church seats, which are fixed seats in the church interior, open up a specific, new perspective on the urban topography and at the same time the platform function of the Avisblatt becomes particularly clear. The data material from the corresponding advertisements in both subject areas is used not only for content analyses but also for testing further digital instruments for digital history.
Joachim Struck, M.A.: "Eingesehen und dem Avisblatt einzurüken befohlen" : das Basler Avis-Blatt in der Helvetik : Anzeigen als Medium institutioneller Kommunikation zwischen 1796 und 1805
The project examines how the Basler Avisblatt, which was firmly anchored as a medium in the everyday life of the people of Basel, was used by the authorities as a semi-official publication organ in the years 1796-1805 - the last years of the Ancien Régime.
