New Salford project helps the Office for National Statistics take its historical data into the digital era

The two-year project will see the complete England & Wales census printed volumes for 1921, 1931, 1951 and 1961 converted into easy to access and use digital data. 

Professor Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) Research Lab at the University said:  “Being solely entrusted to make digitally available this official government data on the population of England & Wales over this long and historically very significant period is an enormous privilege and responsibility.

“We have an existing relationship with the ONS and previously worked on the conversion of digital data for the 1961 Census Small Area Statistics. Our team was responsible for making the data accessible to the public with this being achieved through document recognition and data analysis techniques that we have developed here at the University.“

Find out more about our previous work with the ONS.