A team in the Faculty of Social Science at Western University in London, Ontario has created a mapping platform that allows researchers to see how the people living in specific neighbourhoods have changed during the last 70 years.
The UNI-CEN Canadian Neighbourhood Change Explorer allows researchers to track changes in census areas dating back to 1951.
Click on a neighbourhood and you can find population details on everything from age to household income to education and transportation choices.
The census is conducted every five years by Statistics Canada.
Professor Zach Taylor hopes the mapping platform will be used well beyond the university environment. He said it can provide key details to government departments, high school students and non-profit organizations seeking data on the people they serve.
What the professor didn’t mention, or perhaps hadn’t considered, was how family historians can use the platform to look at how the population in their relatives’ neighbourhood or their own has changed over the years.
Now, if Professor Taylor and his team could include the Canadian censuses back to 1841, family historians would really be jumping for joy.
More information about the platform can be found in Western University’s article.
