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and computer scientists working together to develop technologies for the large-scale processing of huge series of historical documents.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.

Processing the pictures

The first step of the project is to get millions of images from a hundred archive depositories, understand the document structure, and recognize the handwritten text. A portal will allow archive depositories and their publishers to upload images and associated metadata. Then, automated methods will be mobilized to extract the information they contain: line detection, text recognition, consistency tests, etc. The whole process will eventually contribute to produce a "raw" database (RTD) reproducing as closely as possible the listes nominatives: each image will be associated with the text it contains.