From Gossip to Structured Data: AI-assisted multimodal extraction from a historical society magazine

300,000 aristocratic notices and 20,000 portrait photographs in one weekly Viennese society magazine — the Wiener Salonblatt (1870–1938) is essentially fin-de-siècle social media, waiting to be analysed. Transkribus provides the essential first step in a multimodal AI pipeline combining NER and vision-language models, unlocking the self-representation and social networks of the late Habsburg nobility at unprecedented scale.