Belpop, a history-computer project to study the population of a town during early industrialization

The Belpop project aims to reconstruct the demographic behavior of the population of a mushrooming working-class town during industrialization: Belfort. Belfort is a hapax in the French urban landscape of the 19th century, as the demographic growth of its main working- class district far outstripped that of the most dynamic Parisian suburbs. The underlying hypothesis is that the massive Alsatian migration that followed the 1870-71 conflict, and the concomitant industrialization and militarization of the city, profoundly altered the demographic behavior of the people of Belfort. This makes Belfort an ideal place to study the sexualization of social relations in 19th-century Europe. These relationships will first be understood through the study of out-of-wedlock births, in their socio-cultural and bio-demographic dimensions. In the long term, this project will also enable to answer many other questions related to event history analysis, a method that is currently undergoing major development, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), and which is profoundly modifying the questions raised by historical demography and social history. The contributions of deep learning make it possible to plan a complete analysis of Belfort’s birth (ECN) and death (ECD) civil registers (1807-1919), thanks to HTR methods applied to these sources (two interdisciplinary computer science-history theses in progress). This project is part of the SOSI CNRS ObHisPop (Observatoire de l’Histoire de la Population française: grandes bases de données et IA), which federates seven laboratories and aims to share the advances of interdisciplinary research in terms of automating the constitution of databases in historical demography. Challenges also include linking (matching individual data) the ECN and ECD databases, and eventually the DMC database (DMC is the city’s main employer of women).”