A step-by-step guide to creating spatially-contiguous socioeconomic clusters in R using the SKATER algorithm

What does it mean to be “normal”? Consider for a moment the quintessential Canadian city. What does that image in your head look like? Are there outdoor rinks, wheat fields, and abundant Timmies? Does your mental image include a yoga studio, a dispensary, and a third-wave coffee shop? Canadians like to celebrate a self-constructed identity of diversity-the cultural mosaic- that is punctuated with conspicuous Canadiana that binds everything together. Canada is a highly urbanized country–it is a nation of cities, and while every Canadian city has elements that scream “Canada!”, is there a city that can stand above the rest and definitely claim to be the most quintessentially Canadian city of them all? Read more

While putting together the data for the longer post on measuring and visualizing diversity and segregation in Canadian cities, I wanted to see if there was an intuitive way to compare similarity of cities across multiple Census demographic variables at the same time. Comparing across many Census variables at once requires us to think across many dimensions at once. As our eyes really perceive in at best four dimensions, visualizing many dimensions requires a reduction in the number of dimensions from many to the two (or three) dimensions that best allow for visual interpretation. Typically this is done through dimension reducing approaches like principle components but, increasingly, t-SNE has become a preferred technique for embedding highly dimensional data in to lower dimensional space while preserving local structure. Read more

This is the first post from what I hope to be is a series of posts looking at the spatial distribution of different demographic variables in Canadian cities. In this post, I take a look at the diversity of visible minority groups in Canadian cities using Census data. By using a measure that relates diversity to segregation, we can also look at how these cities distribute minority groups and to what extent these cities are segregated. Read more

This interesting post by Nathanael Lauster caught my eye last week looking at the gradual shift in age-specific birth rates for women in British Columbia over the last few decades. Nathanael is a Professor of Sociology at UBC and you may have heard of his book “The Life and Death of the Single-Family House”. _[Tweet no longer available]_ His post includes a striking visual showing the shift in age-specific birth rates for BC between 1989 and 2015. You can really see the year-by-year progression of BC women having more of their children at a later age. Read more

TL;DR: Small multiples maps are one of my favourite ways to communicate multiple variables with a quantitative and spatial dimension. This example uses small multiples to show the distribution of the most spoken non-English languages in the Toronto CMA. Scroll to the end to see the results. After seeing the excellent electoral results maps from the Berliner Morgenpost, I wanted to experiment with a similar approach for an alternative take on my maps of linguistic diversity in Canadian cities. Read more

The Confusion of Tongues, Gustav Doré, engraving c.1865-1868 Language Diversity Index The Language Diversity Index is a quantitative measure of the diversity of languages found in a given area. In a country like Canada with two official languages, a rich history of diverse Aboriginal languages, and a long history of immigration from a wide range of countries and ethno-linguistic cultures, we would expect to see a relatively high score for linguistic diversity. Read more