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and computer scientists working together to develop technologies for the large-scale processing of huge series of historical documents.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

Objectives

Our objectives are threefold. First, Socface will develop new methods to extract individual-level data from a very large set of archival document images, taking advantage of the inherent structure of the original document, and with auto-evaluation of the quality of the process. Second, the project will be the first in France to link records from the same individuals over time on a large scale, opening unprecedented opportunities for research, both during the project and afterwards. Third, using the new data, Socface will investigate social change at the local level for France as a whole to propose a detailed morphology of the evolution of labor markets in France throughout industrialization.