Creating a complete workflow for digitising historical census documents : considerations and evaluation

Clausner, C; Hayes, J; Antonacopoulos, A; Pletschacher, S

Abstract

The 1961 Census of England and Wales was the first UK census to make use of computers. However, only bound volumes and microfilm copies of printouts remain, locking a wealth of information in a form that is practically unusable for research. In this paper, we describe process of creating the digitisation workflow that was developed as part of a pilot study for the Office for National Statistics. The emphasis of the paper is on the issues originating from the historical nature of the material and how they were resolved. The steps described include image pre-processing, OCR setup, table recognition, post-processing, data ingestion, crowdsourcing, and quality assurance. Evaluation methods and results are presented for all steps.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2017 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP2017)
• Start Date: Nov 10, 2017
• End Date: Nov 11, 2017
• Publication Date: Nov 11, 2017
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781450353908
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3151509.3151525
• Related Public URLs: http://events.unifr.ch/hip2017/