The project "Printed markets: information, data and news in the Basler Avisblatt, 1729-1844" has combined the digital processing of the Basel Avisblatt with research into its being a platform for transactions. As a journal for commercial and classified advertisements, the paper provided urban society with a new medium for organising its exchange relations in the context of proto-industrialisation, early capitalism, and increasing marketisation.
In particular, this information platform was used to publish
Among other areas covered, there were
In recent years, research into the transformative period between early and industrial modernity has highlighted a variety of economic developments, especially with a view on the interlinking of production and consumption.
Connections and overlaps between different widely used concepts like the industrial revolution, industrious revolution, consumer revolution, retail revolution, and the early modern media and communication revolution became increasingly clear. It showd that already before the onset of industrialisation, the circulation of consumer goods, information, and people had intensified, and the marketisation of economic activities had become more pronounced. In our project, we understand the Avisblatt platform as an important facilitator of that development.
The ads reflect a variety of ways to organise exchange, to connect people with complementary interests, to establish socio-economic networks, and to share social information, but also discursivise and archive them. The source reflects these possibilities over a span of 116 years. It thus allows to detect long-term changes in patterns of everyday exchange, and to unveil transformations of the urban society and its exchange relations.
The density and richness of the source allows the in-depth analysis of a multitude of different phenomena, which we could by no means exhaust within the scope of the project (see Fields of work and Publications).
Digital processing
In the project, we digitised a full set of volumes of the advertisement paper, from its first publication at the beginning of 1729 to the end of 1744 without any gaps; a total of 6626 issues and around 862,000 individual advertisements and notes. For systematic reasons, the three months from January to March published for the year 1845 are not part of this digital edition.
As part of the project, we have developed workflows and tools for digitising and processing the Avisblatt, which can also be used to digitise and process newspapers or other serial sources. All issues of the Avisblatt were digitised, each issue segmented into individual advertisements and notices, and text recogniction applied to it. The results were compiled into a database of around 932,000 records (including 70,000 section headings), and the records classified using a dictionary-based algorithmic method specifically developed in the project ("dynamic tagging"). The associated R scripts used for this, as well as additional functions to support data analysis were integrated into an R package. This allows users versed in R and data science / natural language processing to make use of the digitized source.
Further information can be found in the technical documentation of the project.
Easy access to data and digitised material
The Database and Viewer on this website provide two ways of using the data we have prepared for users without any knowledge of programming languages. They allow you to search our databases as a simple or advanced search, but also to read and browse through the individual numbers of the Avisblatt over 116 years. Whether you are interested in specific goods markets, real estate, credit, transport and travel, lotteries and charity, lost and found objects, demographics, or a wide array of other topics: the database provides you with a wealth of source material.
