Master's Thesis

Status: in progress (2nd year)

Last update: 20/10/2026

Progress: Corpus collected; mass OCR in progress.

Pasteurizing metropolitan France. Building and exploring a digital corpus (1870-1914).

Objective

Master’s thesis in the history of science, supervised by Anne Rasmussen (EHESS) and Marie Puren (EPITA, ENC), on the “pasteurization” of metropolitan France (1870-1914): Pasteurians, scientific journals, the press, and parliamentarians under the Third Republic.

Corpus

• Scientific journals: 52 journals (agriculture, medicine, industry, biology…), about 1 million pages (Gallica).
• Journal officiel: parliamentary debates 1881-1914, and the 1870-1880 issues.
• Press: 18 titles (Gallica, Europeana).

Done

• Gallica scraping (IIIF and PDF) and metadata extraction; corpus index.
• OCR: benchmark of several engines, pero-ocr selected; 1881-1914 debates and journals processed.
• First-year mini-thesis written in LaTeX (latex_memoire): historiography, research question, sources.

Next steps

• Finish OCR (1870-1880 Journal officiel, press).
• Structure the OCR-processed issues into articles.
• Explore the corpus and write the second-year thesis.

Progress log

• 26/02/2026: created the project page.
• 18/03/2026: PDF scraping pipeline completed (Gallica APIs, Selenium).
• 06/2026: first-year mini-thesis submitted.
• 09/2026: OCR of the Journal officiel debates (1881-1914) and of the journals completed; 1870-1880 Journal officiel scraped.

Source code · Source code 2 · Source code 3

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