The 1971 Census in England & Wales was the first to be processed entirely by computer – though the forms had been delivered to & collected from every household in the traditional way by an enumerator, who first had the job of compiling a complete list of residential addresses in the area allocated to them.
The results were somewhat delayed.
Not solely because of computer problems – compared with the disasters to which we have grown all-too accustomed in recent years things went well - but delays were compounded by the publication process which stuck, for the most part, to doing things the old-fashioned way with bound volumes of printed tables produced according to a schedule fixed in advance. These volumes had then to be ‘Laid’ before the House of Commons before anyone outside the statistical office could see them, & this requirement led to the frustration that sometimes the figures were off the computer but could not be used publicly in any way until they had been laid.
In another measure of just how far we have come since those days, the first published results came out county by county, reflecting the way that the data was first processed one county at a time, with national analyses following on behind.
As publication day for the first county finally loomed I, for one, looked forward to seeing what, if anything, the national media might make of it, especially as it would be my own home county of Derbyshire which was in the spotlight. Most likely, I thought, it would be of no interest to the wider world.
So I was excited to see a whole column in The Guardian, carrying the byline of one of their most senior & respected reporters.
I was genuinely shocked when I realised that this column simply reproduced (albeit with a top & tail) the Press Notice which had been written by the (then) OPCS & sat gathering dust until it could finally be released. I had naively expected that a journalist would look through the volume to find his own story.
Forty years on & how things have changed. All newspapers produced their own charts of the first detailed national figures released this week, with even more details & analysis available on their web sites.
Data journalism is the new big thing – there is even a handbook for it which can be downloaded for free from the web
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