Photographic archives · Digital humanities

The Forbin Dataset

A collection of historical photographs enriched with archival metadata, transcriptions and semantic annotations.

Explore the collection Download the data
Recolorized portrait of Victor Forbin
Victor Forbin (1868–1947), explorer, photographer and writer.
256archive boxes
2document sides, recto and verso
COCOcomputer-vision-ready annotations
CC BY-NC 4.0distribution license

One collection, three perspectives

From historical documents to research data

01

Heritage

Digitized facsimiles from Victor Forbin’s personal archives, preserved within their archival organization.

02

Research

Searchable metadata, places, subjects and transcriptions for history, photography and digital humanities.

03

Computational data

COCO polygons, OCR output and model predictions for document analysis and computer vision.

Digital research desk

Study images, their context and their circulation

The explorer preserves each document’s archival path, from its box to its recto or verso. Full-collection images are loaded on demand from Sharedocs using JSON manifests.

  • Search metadata and transcriptions
  • Compare annotations and predictions
  • Analyze places and geographic conflicts
  • Reuse structured data for research

Documentation and citation

Cite the dataset

The collection combines images, archival metadata and annotations designed for reproducible research.

Read the publication · DOI 
@article{Chelali2026_forbin,
  author = {Chelali, Mohamed and Gosselet, Sylvain-Karl and Cloppet, Florence and Kurtz, Camille and Bloch, Isabelle and Foliard, Daniel},
  doi = {10.5334/johd.487},
  journal = {Journal of Open Humanities Data},
  title = {The FORBIN Dataset: A Collection of Historical Photographs With Archival Metadata},
  year = {2026}
}

About

Archives & Vision Initiative

The Forbin Dataset is developed within the ANR HIGH VISION project (ANR-23-CE38-0001), at the intersection of cultural heritage and computational document analysis.