Global Data Desk

by Patrick Cain

We were busy Tuesday pumping out maps from the latest census release, which covered age and sex - too busy to blog about it until now.

The system we use is based on a KML file of census tracts in Fusion Tables - while the map series presents as 15 local maps, it’s actually 15 local views of one national map. The advantage of this system is that we only have to upload one map per subject, but (for example) Winnipeg can be sent the URL for Winnipeg’s maps, and so forth. The eight now 12 new maps mostly focus on specific demographic slices, like over-65s, and gender ratios.

(Below is a Toronto-area map showing the percentage of children aged 0-9.)

By Leslie Young

PDFs are a fact of life in data journalism. Most of the time, when you request “an electronic file” or “an electronic document” in your Freedom of Information request, the end result is a PDF.

While it’s a step up from simply getting a stack of papers as your response, a PDF response is annoying in a number of ways. It’s hard to work with. Unlike a spreadsheet format, (Excel, .CSV, etc.) you can’t analyze a PDF. You often can’t copy and paste or export the data – sometimes Acrobat won’t even recognize the document as text!

Some departments do respond with an Excel file. Some are even nice enough, when I ask, to email me the Excel version of the PDF response that they had previously sent me. They don’t have to do this, and I really appreciate it.

But it seems like the default electronic file format is the PDF, which means that I will spend hours trying to force the information into a friendlier format. It doesn’t stop me from doing the story, it just makes it more difficult.

So why do many departments seem to favour the PDF? I decided to ask the Treasury Board Secretariat, the body charged with administering the federal government’s Access to Information legislation.

Here’s what they said.

Question:

I would like to know why, when a requester requests an electronic document, the response is usually provided as a PDF.

Why do departments seem to prefer releasing information as PDFs instead of a more open electronic file format, such as an Excel spreadsheet? This is particularly relevant in the case of a request for information from a database, which since it’s a table filled with numbers, would be more useful to a journalist in an Excel or other format.

Answer:

Our government is committed to openness and transparency which is why we are pursuing the Open Government initiative that will continue to make government data freely available, and currently requires all completed ATI summaries to be posted online within 30 calendar days of being readied.  Current Access to Information regulations direct departments to provide information in the format requested wherever possible, and our government continues to update and add to the already hundreds of thousands of data sets and the amount of information available to Canadians online in various formats.  Where alternative formats are not available or suitable, the government will respond with a pdf version in order to ensure that requests for information are still carried out effectively.

So it seems all you need to do is ask – very specifically. It’s a valuable lesson. Next time, I will make sure to ask for a .CSV, and see what happens.

In general, this kind of map is straightforward to do from a  province’s reportable disease database - the disease and the first three characters of the postal code of the patient are generally releasable (at least in Ontario - Alberta refused to release similar data). You have to keep an eye on the proportion of patients whose postal codes are reported, but in this case we have FSAs for all but 21 of 632 Ontario 2010 TB cases, which seems more than acceptable.

Click on the map to see the story:

By Leslie Young

We put together a quick-hit sort of map on Wednesday afternoon.

The Office of the Independent Police Review Director released a report on the conduct of police officers during the G20. In that report was a list of incidents where police officers stopped and searched individuals around downtown Toronto.

Since the report contained locations for each incident, we decided to map them, with the caveat that it is definitely not a comprehensive list of all the stops and searches that happened in Toronto that weekend.

You can see that there were a lot of incidents along Bloor Street, in Parkdale and the east end - well away from the downtown security fence.

Read the story.

As the destruction of the long gun registry looms, federal and Ontario cabinet ministers are in a tug-of-war over the province’s plan to require gun dealers to keep records of who buys firearms.

Before legislation to abolish the registry was passed, Global News obtained postal code data for firearms owners from the RCMP using access-to-information laws. The maps below paint a picture of the geography of gun culture in Ontario.

The province-wide map shows low gun ownership rates in urban and suburban areas (Ottawa, the GTA, Hamilton-Niagara), higher rates in surrounding rural areas, and the highest ones, roughly, north of where viable farmland gives out.

A map showing only Toronto (scroll down to the bottom of the page) shows almost no gun licence holders downtown and the north half of Scarborough, and concentrations of gun owners - by Toronto standards - in Downsview and southern Etobicoke.

by Patrick Cain

Our Atlantic organ donation story bagged an award at the Atlantic Journalism Awards in Fredericton Saturday.

The story itself was based on a map package using the first three characters of the postal codes of registered organ donors in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which showed a lot of local variation. Nova Scotia does better than New Brunswick for organ donation, but New Brunswick does better than other provinces like Ontario and British Columbia.

(We created a similar map for BC.)

We’ve sent a number of data stories east to Halifax, including Nova Scotia and New Brunswick drunk driving data and seasonal changes in fertility in Nova Scotia (and Ontario, Alberta and BC - they’re very similar).