Liste nominative du Personnel Européen de la police et de la sûreté ayant participé à l'activité de la défense passive lors du bombardement de P.Penh du 7-2-45

This record is part of a group of data resources tracing European persons who were resident or serving in East Asia during the early 20th century and who were displaced as a result of national border changes and conflicts. It is one component of Divisive Power of Citizenship—a project of the Institute for European Global Studies, Basel.

The attached records contain the names of the 80 European police personnel who participated in passive defense during the bombardment of Phnom Penh on February 7, 1945. These individuals were recommended for distinguished service. The original documents, now in the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer - Mairie d'Aix-en-Provence, were compiled in April 1950.

An InvenioRDM DPCL corpus repository at https://dpc.ei-basel.hasdai.org/ includes digital versions of the archive documents, supported by a IIIF service, as well as the datasets available in this record. The respective record in the corpus repository can be found by using the handle: 20.500.14202/hasdai.kb0xb-03h2b.

Multiple datasets generated from the source material, including transcriptions of person entries (names, dates of birth and death where available, profession and often location, remarks and operating unit) and structured person instance data derived from them are provided. Key historic person instance information (appearances in documents), serialized as JSON according to a formal schema is available, together with the JSON Schema itself. This is intended for use by external applications, and can also be searched interactively using a DPCL presentation website (see below) which explains the datasets further. In contrast to transcription data, which represents the printed and hand-written source material, and is often organized inconsistently, the historic person instance data provided here enables reliable searching across multiple archival sources. The historic person instance JSON is lightweight to enable scalability across large numbers of sub-collections/archives: it does not contain all of the information sometimes transcribed, such as remarks and military operating unit. However it does provide IIIF canvas IDs, connecting the person instance to the page in the source document where it originally occurred.

Where annotations can be generated from transcriptions they are provided as Web Annotation Data Model (WADM) annotation collections serialized as JSON, which are linked to source documents via PIDs. The annotation data can be used independently with the IIIF service provided by the InvenioRDM corpus repository to connect person instances interactively to their occurrence in the source documents. Provided principally for analysis preservation and verification purposes, the transcription data is less suitable for automated searching than the historic person instance JSON (above).

A project website at https://www.divisive-power.org/ offers case studies well as search facilities which have access to all of the DPCL datasets, and additionally to other Divisive Power of Citizenship datasets.

This work is funded by Swiss National Science Foundation grant 100011_184860/1 “Divisive Power of Citizenship”