Vienna Time Machine: Photo Module

Project Funding: BMFWF (LBG Transformation Budget)
Project Duration: 01.10.2025–31.12.2026
Project Lead: Ingo Zechner (LBIDH Team and overall lead), Helmut Berger (MAX Team)
Project Staff: Sema Colpan (LBIDH), Iris Fraueneder (LBIDH), Ronald Genswaider (MAX), Ronny Günl (LBIDH), Jakob Zenzmaier (LBIDH)
Project Partners: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History, Wien (LBIDH), max.recall information systems GmbH (MAX)
Cooperation Partners: Vienna Municipal and Provincial Archives (City of Vienna MA 08), Vienna City Library (City of Vienna MA 09), Surveying and Mapping (City of Vienna MA 41)

VIENNA TIME MACHINE (VTM) is the vision of a historical in-depth exploration of the city by digital means. The aim is to create a publicly accessible online platform on which films, videos, photos, and text documents can be viewed, analyzed, annotated, and linked across different media and used for various forms of engagement with the city’s past and present. The first steps of this modular project focus on the history of Vienna in the modern era – from the Fin de Siècle to the late 20th century and up to the present day (“MODERN VIENNA TIME MACHINE / Zeitmaschine Modernes Wien”).

After creating a film module, in a second step, extensive collections of historical photos held by the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna will be integrated into the VIENNA TIME MACHINE as a photo module, georeferenced, linked to films and other materials, and thus made digitally accessible to researchers and the interested public.

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Through the integration of an additional photo module, the VIENNA TIME MACHINE will become a central repository for digitized visual and audiovisual media on the history of Vienna in the modern era.

Advanced digitization of historical documents offers the possibility for their indexing and use with the help of a clever combination of artificial and human intelligence (of automated and manual analysis processes). Dated, georeferenced, indexed in terms of content and linked to other documents, each of these documents provides an insight into a further temporal layer of urban spaces: the present becomes permeable to the past.

VIENNA TIME MACHINE uses and extends methods and technologies developed by LBIDH, Austrian Film Museum, TU Wien and max.recall in Visual History of the Holocaust. Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age (2019–2023) and in other previous projects. The online platform particularly builds on the VHH Media Management and Search Infrastructure (MMSI) and uses open data services of the City of Vienna (ViennaGIS, Wien Geschichte Wiki).

The Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History) is a founding member of the Time Machine Organisation (TMO).