dotdensity
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
How are big Canadian Metros growing? Can we see different patterns? Here we want to provide a brief look back at the last 25 years, exploring change over time from 1996 to our most recent Census in 2021. This is also a test of R skills for one of us, who began this post as a learning exercise drawing upon Jens' excellent CanCensus package and recent data updates.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
How did early planners envision Vancouver’s future growth? Fortunately for us, they left a prediction in dot-density map form! Here we compare their prediction to a dot-density map from today. Let’s check out how our dot destiny unfolded!
Vancouver grew rapidly from its incorporation in 1886 right up to the great crash of 1913, followed by WWI and a raging influenza epidemic (which we all know way too much about now).
Vancouver had elections on Saturday, today Toronto had their elections. And as opposed to Vancouver, Toronto has wards. Which makes things more fun, as we can look at census data for each ward to understand how people voted in the ward. We ran a very similar type of analysis the other day for Vancouver, so this is an easy add.
The Toronto Open Data catalogue has data for the ward boundaries and a custom tab with census data.
I started writing this blog post in December 2015, when CensusMapper quite a bit younger and I hacked together some basic dot-density maps. I never much liked the results and have been slowly improving and thinking about them. I am still not entirely happy with the current implementation, but it is slowly getting there. The final impulse to finsish this post was the work on cancensus, and R wrapper for the CensusMapper API my explorations in multi-category dot density maps in R, now tied up into the new dotdensity package.
