Divisive Power of Citizenship and Loyalty - the French case

This website accompanies research conducted by Christian Futter between 2018 and 2022 as part of the SNF Divisive Power of Citizenship project of the Institute for European Global History, Basel. DPCL has gathered archival sources internationally relating to European citizens resident in Indochina during World War II, including material recently released by the French Government, and analyzed them using novel digital methods. An introduction to the research questions addressed by Futter is already available (link), and a full dissertation will be published during 2023.

DPCL's archival material presented multiple processing challenges before it could be used for research. On one hand digital methods enable empirical research to be conducted at scale, since the tens of thousands of persons documented in the DPCL sources are too large to compare manually with each other or against external resources. On the other hand, computer extraction of irregular type-writer fonts and manuscript, often over-written with officials' comments, defeats conventional computer character recognition techniques. Further, the order in which names, identification numbers, locations etc appear on the page is inconsistent—sometimes within a single source—and the information available varies between archival sources. The novel approach developed and applied successfully by DPCL is to combine tailorable software for recognition of computer text from page imagery together with manual inspection and checking workflows which are able to outsource extraction to a community of contributors on an individual task basis. In addition, application of a historical person instance schema has enabled the organization of information extracted by DCPL into a single data structure which can be used efficiently at larger scale with historic person information produced by other research activities—both within and external to the larger EIB Divisive Power program. This approach has enabled 47 independent DCPL archive sources, having such heterogeneous layouts and presenting a range of extraction issues, to be processed with high accuracy, so that they can be compared automatically with other corpora. The curated studies presented here illustrate some of the variations in source material layout and the different circumstances and purposes for which the individual DCPL archive materials were originally gathered by officials in Indochina.

An important outcome of the DPCL project is the publication of data resources, which have been developed from the archival material in this way, for use by the wider scientific community. These resources embody the investment of extracting accurate historic person instance data at scale from the printed sources, and they are linked where possible to digital page imagery showing their original context via online services. A range of other research questions can be supported by these services, which also provide an empirical foundation that can be extended and further enriched in the future by other scholars. Continued accessibility to this data is therefore essential and, accordingly, long-term data preservation techniques have been employed.

An InvenioRDM repository with integrated IIIF services provides a standards-based and maintainable platform for digital versions of the archival material (except in a small number of cases in which only pre-processed data was available from the institution hosting the archive). Each archival source is represented as a record in the dpc-eib.basel.hasdai.org repository, which provides persistent identifiers (PIDs) for each page image file. This enables person instance data and Web Annotation Data Model (WADM) annotations to be reliably connected to the archival sources in the long-term, independent of software applications that may be employed for research or presentation. In turn, historic person instance data (serialized as JSON) is attached to each archival record, and also deposited as a linked record in the Zenodo global catch-all repository of the European Commission.