GEMER takes into account all the records concerning seamen. This project cross-references the divisions of seamen's registers and the crews books with the civil registers. This allows us to follow each seaman in his navigations, but also to study his coastal links (family, habitat, multi-activity) and get a more precise idea about the problems concerning health or hygienic conditions (anthropology, epidemiology, funeral rites). This is a whole population, "the people of the shores" that emerges and that during eight generations, faces crises, wars and diseases, endures the weight of the State and adjusts to the new social and economic conditions. The rich sources of information allow us to tell the story of all these women and men. These sources allow to retrace a culture both wordily and intangible, always shaped by tradition, sometimes shaped by renewal with its unavoidable disruptions, renewal which is based on submission or resilience. GEMER is therefore a database where there will be 20.000 seamen registered in the class records covering the period from 1690 to 1790: in this database, you will also find the relatives of these seamen, their ascendant, descendant or collateral kinships, as well as their godfathers and godmothers. Three territories having equivalent populations and geographic configurations have been chosen: Plessis-Bertrand Estate with Cancale, the maritime district of the Seudre with Marennes and the district of Berre Pond with Martigues. This research will allow us to carry out a wide and complex study in historical anthropology, by multiplying science-based measures on the three defined areas of interest which complement, support and cross one another. We will study the lenght of careers at sea, the duration of navigations, the number of accidents and epidemics on board, the death rate at sea, the organization of labour and the question of wages. Besides, when seamen go back home, they are reunited with their families. So our study will deal with the way the sailors’ wives, sisters or daughters handle the situation in their prolonged absence. The study will also deal with agency, solidarity amongst women, female multi-activity, additional incomes, relationship with the representatives of the Church (the priests) and relationship with the representatives of the State (the Admiralty officers, "la sénéchaussée", the Commissioner of the "Marine du Roi"). After observing the health conditions of the seamen and their families’ questions may be asked about fecundity and survival, mainly concerning mothers and their infants. The way of life of these populations and the dangers that threaten the seamen have an influence on this social group’s demography. Its components linked with historical demography (marriage rate, fecundity, mortality, mobilities and migrations) will be analysed. What’s the GEMER project? It is an open access database: it will allow us to organize several study sessions that will lead to many publications as well as an international conference with proceedings both in English and in French; there will be also a book including all the elements highlighted by this research and a website will be opened. GEMER will organize a travelling exhibition and a docu drama about a trip to the South Sea will be also made: this documentary fiction will speak about seamen who sail to Newfoundland but who also "discover" the West Indies and the transatlantic slave trade, then, they go to the Mediterranean and finally travel to China. When war breaks out once again, they are also formidable privateers. A close relationship will be established with learned societies in order to reproduce this pattern, as well as with the Education Office.

This project will: 1) develop the most ambitious H-GIS municipal boundary data in the world by recreating municipal boundaries for the whole of France year by year over the last two hundred years, linking historical administrative units to population and transport accessibility data. 2) Develop and use a multimodal model of transport networks to analyse changes in economic geography and historical demography over the period. 3) We will use this HGIS to analyse spatial and historical variations in population density and population geography as a proxy for economic development over the period. Linked to other rich historical data, this HGIS will become a reference for all social scientists. This important tool is still missing as previous attempts have not succeeded in producing a reliable and accurate database of boundary change, mainly because of the lack of a systematic collection of historical records to reconstruct past administrative units. This project combines the strength and expertise of French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP, Cambridge), and ThéMA Lab from Bourgogne-Franche-Comté University. It also counts with the implication of the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) and the active support of some of the most prominent European scholars in our Advisory Board. Thanks to a team of highly-qualified research associates and research assistants we can guarantee with confidence the success of this ambitious project. The unique combination of the historical and cartographic expertise of our teams will allow us to fill this major historical gap. Thanks to the seminal work by Séguy and Théré, who compiled a list of all boundary changes since 1801, we have devised a method to reconstruct historical administrative boundaries efficiently and accurately. We will be using a combination of historical and cartographic sources drawing upon administrative records, official maps from the Service Géographique de l’Armée (SGA) and IGN, and other cartographic material such as cadastral mapping, and recent land surveys. Overall c.15% of all communes, will require exhaustive archival research all over France in order to digitise contemporary maps of administrative boundaries. Over the years the CAMPOP has developed significant expertise by reconstructing English and Welsh parish-level boundaries for the period 1831-1881 with sources scarcer than in the French case. The project will draw upon the significant expertise of ThéMA in recreating historical transport infrastructure, to complete the French historical road network and all navigable waterways over three centuries. The preliminary work we have been carrying out since the submission of our first-round application has vindicated our initial estimates and confirmed the feasibility of the project under strict time and cost constraints. Our deliverables include: 1) the first and only set of GIS boundary data for all French communes from 1790 to the present linked to population data and transport networks. The novel methodology devised for this project will be replicable to other countries. 2) Linking large databases to fine spatial units through time will be a major breakthrough in the application of quantitative and comparative analyses of large datasets to history. 3) Build a truly multi-modal model of analysis to assess the effect of changing journey times and costs on spatial population dynamics and patterns of economic development. 4) All our data will be on open access to provide transparency, traceability and guarantee the dissemination of our work. The scientific legacy of our project is guaranteed by depositing all the data to the Archives Nationales. 5) Public impact and engagement with our work will be enhanced by the diffusion through popular platforms such as IGN Géoportail and Remonter le Temps portals, Cambridge’s Travel in Times’ and Geneanet’s websites.

The 19th and 20th centuries were a period of dramatic changes in France, as the way people lived, worked, and interacted, and the places where they did it, changed beyond recognition. The general picture is well documented as historians, economists, and sociologists have studied urbanization, industrialization, and the demographic transition and their role in the long-term evolution of French society. Much less is known about the spatial variation of these phenomenon, their mechanisms, and their effects. Thus, there is a discrepancy between the complete national macro-data that gives the “big picture” of the evolution for France as a whole (or, at best, at the département level) and the various local micro-data that offer a much more precise history for some locations but are difficult to generalize. This gap not only prevents more fine-grained analyses of underlying dynamics of historical evolution, but it also limits our understanding of the mechanisms of social change. Relevant archival material exists, but the methods to collect and exploit it on a national scale are yet to be created. This is the aim of the SOCFACE project, which proposes technical innovations from a computer science perspective in order to build invaluable resources for the social sciences. SOCFACE will process, for the first time, all listes nominatives du recensement from 1836 to 1936. Produced every five year, these listes are organized spatially (municipality; wards, hamlets, or streets; houses; households) and summarize the information from the census, listing each individual with some of his or her characteristics, e.g., name, year of birth, or occupation. The sheer number of listes (around 15 million images from 1836 to 1936, corresponding to approximately 700 million individual records) and their dispersion over space (they are located in almost a hundred archives depository) limited their use until know. We will develop automated methods to extract the information they contain. Indeed, automatic recognition of handwritten documents does produce today usable transcription but it relies excessively on large samples of annotated data from the initial corpus or on preexisting linguistic models. Putting together archivists, historians, economists, demographers, and computer scientists, SOCFACE aims at overcoming the technological limitations that prevent automatic processing of a huge but homogenous collection of historical sources–with the same structure but written by tens of thousands of different people–by developing auto-supervised recognition models. In addition, and to better harvest the wealth of the listes, SOCFACE will link individuals between censuses using automated methods developed recently for the US census, adapting them to the French sources, relying on our long experience in building historical datasets and linking records on a large (albeit much smaller) scale. SOCFACE will be the first project in France to link records from the same individuals over time on a large scale, opening huge opportunities for research, both during the project and afterwards. Thus, SOCFACE will represent an unprecedented advance relative to existing methods to process extremely large series of handwritten historical documents, that could be used to decipher many other potential archival documents. SOCFACE will produce a complete database of all individuals who lived in France between 1836 and 1936 and use it to analyze social change from the ground up, greatly improving our understanding of French economic and social structures. The other major impact of SOCFACE will be for the access to listes nominatives by the general public. Thanks to FranceArchives, we will disseminate the information available in the listes in Open Access, allowing anyone to browse hundreds of millions of records freely. This will be a major improvement compared with the limited number of observations and recollection, mostly partial in time and location, available today.