The project
The Socface project develops automatic handwriting recognition technologies to analyze all census lists from 1836 to 1936 (i.e. 20 censuses) and produce a database of individuals who lived in France during this period.
About us
Funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), the Socface project brings together archivists, demographers, economists, historians and computer scientists working together to develop technologies for the large-scale processing of huge series of historical documents.
- Partners
- Team
Recollection of the images
Contact and information on the project for the archivists who would like to be part of it.
Schedule
From September 2021 to March 2025, we will collect, process, standardize and analyze individual data from the French censuses.

Linking individuals

The text recognition from all images of the listes nominatives will contribute to build a set of individual data structured by municipality and by census year: millions of lines, each containing the name and surname of an individual (and some of his characteristics). Of course, many of these lines correspond to the same person, observed in different censuses.

Our objective is to link the lines that correspond to the same person, in order to follow the individuals during their life, from census to census. To do this, given the mass of data to be processed, we will set up automatic matching methods.