FRONT_JUSTICE
On the Front of Justice. A Digital Reading of Military Justice during the First World War
Scientific responsibility :
- Giovanni Vitali
Methodological axes :
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Funding :
- DIM PAMIR
Project ID : IDF-DIM-PAMIR-2026-10-007
Summary :
On the Front of Justice. A Digital Reading of Military Justice during the First World War (FRONT_JUSTICE) investigates the practices of French and Italian military justice during the First World War through a large corpus of judicial archives. The project has built and digitised a corpus of several thousand case files in order to use military justice as an observatory of wartime societies. It combines history, digital humanities and automated document processing to enable the systematic analysis of archival sources that have so far been difficult to study at scale. A dedicated digital infrastructure has been developed for document segmentation, the automatic recognition of printed and handwritten texts, HTR model training, and the processing of the resulting transcriptions. The project’s methods and software developments are also documented and shared through several GitHub repositories (https://github.com/orgs/Front-Justice/repositories). The analysis of defendants’ profiles makes it possible to examine their social backgrounds, family situations, levels of education and behaviour in wartime. The project therefore seeks to understand how social identities influenced soldiers’ conduct and the ways in which the military institution judged them. FRONT_JUSTICE thus brings together the valorisation of archival heritage, the creation of reusable research data, methodological innovation, and new quantitative, social and anthropological approaches to the history of the First World War.
Legend: Photograph of a judgment issued by the First French Army, taken during the digitization of the archives.
