Chocolate Sellers, Electric Pictures and Movie Palaces: Women 's work and descriptions of cinema in the 1911 census

The 1911 census gives historians a snapshot register of working roles in Britain; and is the first to do so in the words (and handwriting) of the people it describes, and is the first to record a semi-formed cinema industry. The dataset promised a comprehensive record of women workers, working above and below the line, on and before the screen.
The methodologies of data collection and dlgitisation, 100 years apart, impact upon the data collected - their scope and agenda conceal some data, obscure some individuals; but these processes of erasure reveal the bias and distinctions of the data collectors and the self described.
Envisaged as a 'bigdata' project, the small data, the process of self description, proves compelling and instructive. While suffragists boycotted the census, the desire of systematically unrecorded Working class women to asserting themselves within the official record is no less political; a conscious act of autobiography loaded with prestige, distinction and legacy.