In a few words

The Socface project aims at developing automatic handwriting recognition technologies to transcribe all the census lists from 1836 to 1936 (i.e. 20 censuses). The information gathered will be used to produce a database of all individuals who lived in France during this period and to follow them throughout their lives. Then, we will take advantage of this database to analyze the evolution of French society over a century. The data obtained from the census lists will then be made available to the general public, allowing anyone to freely browse through millions of records.