Faces of Nobility. AI-assisted image analysis of the Wiener Salonblatt (1870–1938)

The Wiener Salonblatt was one of the most popular society magazines in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Published from 1870 to 1938, it featured short notices on personal achievements, travels, and family matters, as well as images—both primarily contributed by members of the nobility. The approximately 300,000 notices and 20,000 images fulfilled a function comparable to posts on contemporary social media platforms: maintaining social connections and cultivating a public persona. This project applies quantitative image analysis to the corpus, examining it from three perspectives: evolution of magazine illustration, particularly the shift from lithography to photography and changing visual motifs; aristocratic self-representation, focusing on family imagery and recurring portrait features; portrait photography, with attention to pose, composition, facial expression, and social differentiation. This poster provides an introduction to the project and shows the proposed processing pipeline and data model.