'Madison' Lets You Look through 1960s New York Times Ads

Have a fascination for the world of old-timey advertisements? You can now get your fill with a tool from the New York Times called Madison, which is a crowdsourcing project that lets readers go through historic ads in the paper's archives.

While the Times has been digitizing its news articles, a century and a half of ads is a more complicated project since the ads' layout and typeface are difficult to sort algorithmically. But their rich cultural offerings are too good to pass up.

"News events and reporting give us one perspective on our past, but the advertisements running alongside these articles provide a different view, giving us a sense of the culture surrounding these events," wrote the Times' Erika Allen. "Alternately fascinating, funny and poignant, they act as commentary on the technology, economics, gender relations and more of that time period."

The project, which for now includes ads from the 1960s with more decades to come, incorporates some "gaming elements" that encourage volunteers to return, CNET noted. The tool tracks user progress and gives new titles such as "Fledgling Finder" or "Rookie Finder" based on how many ads the reader has identified.

Readers choose between finding, which identifies individual ads; tagging, which identifies the type of product and company name in the ad; and transcribing, where users type out the text in the ad.

Users can also share their findings on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest or as a link.

Eventually, the Times hopes to make its 150 years' worth of ads a public resource for historians and today's advertisers.