Creating a Complete Workflow for Digitising Historical Census Documents: Considerations and Evaluation

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

Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP2017), Kyoto, Japan, November 2017, pp. 83-88

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.

Citation

C. Clausner, J. Hayes, A. Antonacopoulos, S. Pletschacher , "Creating a Complete Workflow for Digitising Historical Census Documents: Considerations and Evaluation", Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP2017), Kyoto, Japan, November 2017, pp. 83-88

DOI

10.1145/3151509.3151525

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