Napoleonic Job Applications: from Personal Pleas to Modern Curriculum Vitae in Early 19th-Century Europe

Today, knowing how to write a curriculum vitae is essential to getting the job you want, proving your knowledge and skills.

Even if these two elements are now at the core of the public debate on meritocracy, their growing importance is the result of a historical process, made of political, social and cultural changes.

The NapApps project aims to trace the origin of this process, through a comparative analysis of more than 700 spontaneous job applications from the Napoleonic era.

It was Napoleonic France that spread through Europe the revolutionary model according to which public employment would be open to all citizens, without any distinction other than that of one's virtues and talents.

Despite a growing historiographical interest in writing-to-the-power sources, used by the New Napoleonic History to assess the impact of Napoleonic reforms in Europe, no scholar has ever tried to exploit their richness through a quantitative approach.

NapApps will fill this gap, being a pioneering project which applies statistical text analysis to a vast corpus of modern sources to reveal how people interiorised new values, starting to portray themselves and behave like professionals.

Once collected, job applications will be fully transcribed and unified in a digital collection made available to the public.

The statistical data and text analysis of this corpus will be achieved thanks to the specific training carried out at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at the University of Stanford.

These new skills will be transferred at Ca’ Foscari University, where a master’s degree in Digital and Public Humanities has recently been created.

Since I already have some digital skills, the new ones acquired through this project will complete my profile as a digital humanist, enhancing my career opportunities in Europe.

Additionally, specific training on transferable skills, teaching activities and publications will contribute to my development as an independent researcher.