Recent progress in Digital Humanities opens new avenues for creating large databases of archival documents. The elaboration of these databases relies on advanced optical character recognition techniques, working now for both printed and handwritten writing. The evolution of a population can now be reconstructed through the systematic collection of ancient administrative documents, for the benefit of a variety of historical studies. The project “Names of Lausanne” aims to develop a database of the population of Lausanne between 1803 and 1900 through the automatic extraction of archival documents from different heritage institutions in Lausanne (civil records, census data, directories). This database will be first exploited for linguistic analysis, in particular regarding the evolution of name variants.
