Crowdsourcing Historical Tabular Data-1961 Census of England and Wales

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).