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Crowdsourcing Historical Tabular Data: 1961 Census of England and Wales

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Published:20 September 2019Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper describes how crowdsourcing can be incorporated as an integral part of a comprehensive technical workflow to identify, extract and validate data from large volumes of printed tabular statistics, and transform them into operable digital datasets using current structural and descriptive standards. The recently completed digitisation project for the 1961 Census of England and Wales (commissioned by the UK's Office for National Statistics) is used to provide details on data processing, crowdsourcing platform and tasks, crowd interaction, and validation of results. The multi-modal approach employed was very successful, delivering far more complete and validated data than automated processes alone could produce (due to the challenging nature of the source material).

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  1. Crowdsourcing Historical Tabular Data: 1961 Census of England and Wales

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Other conferences
        HIP '19: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing
        September 2019
        98 pages
        ISBN:9781450376686
        DOI:10.1145/3352631

        Copyright © 2019 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

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        Publication History

        • Published: 20 September 2019

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        Acceptance Rates

        HIP '19 Paper Acceptance Rate15of26submissions,58%Overall Acceptance Rate52of90submissions,58%

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