The Pronghorn Primer

Parliamentary Democracy for Cartographers

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Would you believe that way back in 2022, I gave a NACIS conference talk that was all about making election maps?? And the good people at NACIS even uploaded it to YouTube forever!

Give it a watch here.

I watched this video with the sound turned off and I honestly had no idea that I was this animated of a speaker. Is this what the rest of you guys have been putting up with all this time?

Alberta Municipal Election Day!

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

See post title.

What were Albertans doing this time four years ago, other than voting for their mayors and city councillors? Well, Premier Jason Kenney (remember that guy?) decided to make everybody vote on two EXTRA ballot questions at the same time. These maps will explain it all.

As a cartographer, I find these 2021 ballot questions especially entertaining because one of them was almost (but not quite) entirely apolitical. Other countries have a strong tradition of holding plebiscites and referendums on unconventional policy questions all the time, but these kinds of elections are quite rare in Canada. We don't often get to see how hundreds of thousands of Canadians collectively react when you ask them questions that few care very strongly about!

Daylight Savings Time

For some reason, Premier Kenney decided to put this issue in the public spotlight. He may have actually sincerely personally cared about abolishing Daylight Savings Time.

In my experience, most Canadians will generally say that they find changing the clocks to be a nuisance, but it's not hard to find hidden reservoirs of support for the time change. Don't ask me: Saskatchewan is the only province to have fully abolished the measure. (I personally love setting up new computers and telling them that I'm on Regina time. It makes me feel like I live in a rogue state.)

Kenney's specific proposal would have permanently placed Alberta on Saskatchewan time, leading to a geographically elegant result where Saskatchewan border communities tended to strongly support the measure. Conversely, the Rocky Mountain border regions would have been 2 hours apart from their British Columbia neighbours for half the year. Because you can see the Rocky Mountains from the province's largest city just by looking out the window, it is possible that a permanent switch to B.C. time would have been more popular.

It is very likely that Kenney's personal unpopularity also contributed to the failure of the DST question. In a country where referendums are not routine and cannot be initiated by regular citizens, any government decision to introduce one (especially on a niche issue attracting little passion) will inevitably be tied to the public's general opinion of the current administration.

Constitutional Change

Isn't it interesting to imagine a world where the hottest political questions of the day are sort of trivial and harmless? Don't worry, Kenney's other referendum question was a real humdinger.

Many Albertans believe that their tax dollars single-handedly subsidize the rest of the country, and are angry about having never been sent even a single bilingual thank-you letter by the collective people of New Brunswick. This ballot question was crafted in a laboratory to entice this large group of aggrieved cranks to show up to vote on municipal election day.

Constitutional lawyers would have you know that this is not actually how the Canadian constitution works, but when was the last time you ever met a constitutional lawyer? Exactly.

The opponents of this measure generally felt that the entire question was illegitimate, leading to a sure-fire victory for the "Yes" side. As far as we know, only the left-ish inner city of Calgary was brave enough to vote against it in any significant numbers. (Interestingly, it also flopped in rural Lamont County, home to Canada's highest concentration of Ukrainian speakers. Your guess is as good as mine.)

To date, this referendum result has had absolutely no impact on the Constitution Act.

Hey, where's Edmonton?

When I made these maps in late 2021, I was unable to find detailed returns for these two ballot questions on Edmonton's open data portal. The city simply did the bare minimum required by law, and sent off the total vote counts to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. It's possible that this was a deliberate snub of Kenney's Conservative government by the city's progressive outgoing mayor - or else I'm just overthinking things.

Best of luck to today's happy voters! Tonight, we can only guess how many candidates will be allowed to complain that they were only 9 votes away from winning.

Digital Marketing!

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Have you noticed a strange experiment happening around the city of Yorkton?

For the last two weeks, east-central Saskatchewan residents have been bombarded by my first-ever Facebook ad, and the wonderful¹ Meta Conglomerate tells me that 6,000 people have now laid eyes on it.

Inorganic Life

For the entire life of my business, I've generally relied on organic social media: I post cool maps for my own entertainment, people reblog them, and sometimes they even reach journalists, who decide that they want to interview me. Actually, I've barely put any real effort into marketing. My business has simply grown because I'm a compulsive poster who likes to produce interesting graphics, and because I used Twitter during the same years that most journalists also did.

This is great, but I currently have 1,500 Saskatchewan wall maps sitting in my basement, and my life would be significantly improved if I could exchange them tomorrow for $120,000. (Any takers?)

So, I have decided to pay a giant evil company to tell people that I exist: inorganic social media.

Apparently, this is Facebook's only profitable service, so I sure hope that it's a quality one! Help me out by liking my brand-new Facebook page.

My Experiment

When I sell my maps in person, I really just rely on people's natural curiosity. Almost everybody, when confronted with a large map, will walk straight up to it, and immediately try to find their own house. Because this is a law of nature, I do not have a high-pressure sales routine.

In Saskatchewan, where most white people are 1 or 2 generations off the farm, people will also immediately try to find Grandpa's house. This is the key step where they realize that my wall map is superior to every other wall map they have ever seen.

With digital marketing, I figure you can't rely on the same level of attention that you get at a physical tradeshow, so I decided to simply use precision geographic targeting to bonk people over the head with a small excerpt. This seems like an obvious fit for the product literally being a wall map.

This ad was only served to people who live within 25 kilometers of Yorkton. I wonder how many realized that it was custom made just for them?

I liked the case-study model for another reason: I don't trust Facebook worth a damn. Facebook will happily serve me a dashboard full of opaque metrics, implying that my ad campaign is doing amazing, and it only needs more money and more spyware to be even more effective. Wow!

The only thing I care about is getting maps out of my basement, so by picking a particular corner of the province, I can tell if my ad is working because I will be making sales to the specific area that my ad is targeting.

Spyware!

One thing that would raise my Meta Opportunity Score would be installing a Meta tracker on... this very website! They cutely (and incorrectly) call this piece of software a "pixel", probably as part of a 50-year conspiracy to destroy digital literacy among the public.

I might eventually have some compelling reason to go back on my word, in which case this blog post will be out of date. But as of the time of writing, pronghornmaps.com does not have any analytics software installed on it. I don't know who the hell you are! I don't know where the hell you live! I don't know why the hell you're here! I don't even know how long you spend looking at my webpages, although I do privately hope that you've obsessively read every single piece of text I've ever written. Fun fact: almost every other website you visit does know this information about you, at least in some aggregated form.

If my website loads fast, it's because I built it from scratch to do exactly one thing: sell you maps². It is incredible how much we have all gotten used to a bloated, miserable, limited, corporate Internet.

Interestingly, Facebook has been pretending that it can't tell me how many people have clicked on my ad, because I have refused to install its tracker. This is really interesting, since Facebook is actually 100% in control of its own bloated, miserable, limited, corporate website, which is where my ad exists and is viewable.

Ad Copy

I am not amazing at writing promotional marketing text. I think I'm really funny, which is not a great quality when you're actually trying to accomplish a specific goal.

To my surprise, Facebook actually asks you to submit a few headlines and text pieces. These will be randomly combined by Facebook's computers. I didn't mind being asked to do this, because I had to get a few stinkers out before I came up with anything good.

For my main tagline I decided to go with This map has every ghost town - a controversial claim that I've never made before, because I actually know that my map doesn't have every ghost town. Hey, anything for engagement, right?

Every Ghost Town

Since you've read this far, let me confirm that my map has every railway ghost town in Saskatchewan. I used old grain elevator license books to put together a complete, archival inventory of locations where trains used to stop. In that sense, my wall map is roughly comparable to the old Wheat Pool calendar map, a free giveaway item of yore that's well-remembered by a shockingly large proportion of my customers.

Human geography is messy and complicated, and "ghost town" does not have a universally accepted definition. In particular, Western Canada is dotted with...

abandoned rural community halls
abandoned rural post offices
abandoned rural schools
abandoned rural churches
abandoned rural general stores

Wherever two or more of these buildings overlap, that's a "ghost town" to some, even if there was never actually a permanent residential population in the area. At my first museum job I actually got to read an academic paper about this! (Basically, the railways had absolutely no respect for these pre-existing landmarks. Most prairie towns started as an older version of themselves, located a couple miles from where the tracks were eventually rammed through.)

To copy my fairly diplomatic response here: With thousands and thousands of rural post offices and rural schools in Saskatchewan, the line had to be drawn somewhere - although I would love to make an even bigger and better version showing these places too!

(I actually really appreciate this comment, because it's proof that people ARE clicking my link - ██████ and ████████ aren't visible in the ad image.)

Results

After two weeks, I have given the Meta Conglomerate $75 of my own money, and I have made two map sales into the Yorkton-Melville area (earning $160). As much as I have been complaining about the Meta Conglomerate, that actually makes this experiment a pretty profitable endeavour.

I am entertained to see that my post has currently earned 24 Facebook likes, which seems to be more than a usual ad gets. Maybe it's because I'm really handsome and my product is amazing?

I don't want to ruin every holiday surprise that I'm saving up, but if you live in a smaller Saskatchewan city, you might just get to experience the next generation of my super sophisticated micro-targeting strategy come November...

Citation needed.↩
And freelance GIS services.↩

Simple vs. Complicated

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When I'm not making doomed runs for public office, I like to upload free maps to Wikipedia. (I'm not sure that I ever would have gotten into politics if I didn't have the motivation of getting to see my own name on my favourite website.)

I've been doing it for an embarrassingly long time, so my Wikipedia edit history is probably the best unbroken record of my personal development as a cartographer. I am pretty sure that I actually discovered QGIS because I was originally interested in making better statistical maps for Canadian geography articles. Thanks for launching my entire career, Wikipedia!

Complicated

When I started using GIS software, I was overwhelmed by the experience. I had been so frustrated from a lifetime of looking at low-quality statistical maps online, never showing me all the information that I really wanted to know. Now I finally had the basic software skills I needed. All this granular census data (paid for by my tax dollars) was finally at my fingertips.

I went way overboard.

This is the Alberta population density map that I made and uploaded when I was still in undergrad. It uses census dissemination areas.

You can tell that I made this map while I was in the middle of getting a physics degree - it is way too cute to label a population density scale with the unconventional unit notation "km^-2".

Simple

A couple years ago, I decided to revisit some of my Wikipedia maps. I like attention, so I figured it would be fun to make some highly visible work for some high-traffic geography articles (like, say, Alberta).

This is the Alberta population density map that I made and uploaded after a few years of having a career. It uses a custom mixture of municipal boundaries, arbitrarily selected by me.

Simple vs. Complicated

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I find a lot of beginner-intermediate GIS maps tend to confidently use the maximum available level of detail, and a lot of beginner-intermediate GIS users will often confidently say that more information always makes a better map.

Not so fast!

Visual complexity has nothing to do with effort. It sounds unbelievable unless you've personally played with GIS software, but because government census data is distributed at a very granular level, my 2016 Alberta density map is a great example of a completely out-of-the-box data visualization. I was able to create it in less than one hour.
A phrase like "better map" is incredibly loaded, despite being constantly thrown around by hobbyists. Most maps have some kind of intended purpose, and some kind of expected audience. Are you really confident that you understand the purpose AND that you're part of the audience?

Intended purpose

Both of these maps are intended for display on Wikipedia, where they will ultimately occupy a very small fraction of your monitor. Viewed in context, the idea of a supremely complicated map to end all maps (with SIXTEEN separate colour classes!) suddenly seems a bit out of place.

Yes, users technically have the option of clicking dense images to view them in more detail. We all want to flatter ourselves by imagining that our maps are the best things ever, so users will be certain to get a closer look at what we make. Wrong.

Try watching somebody else browse a web page that you really care about. You will be immensely disappointed. People evaluate the overwhelming majority of online material based on context, not comprehension.

Expected audience

I'm very familiar with Alberta's geography, so I love the extra detail in my 2016 map. The outline of the fertile Peace River Country is faintly visible against the province's northern boreal forest. You can see the rural population density decline in the southeast as rainfall becomes less reliable. Irrigation districts light up with a gentle yellow glow, human ingenuity surpassing the basic conditions of the harsh prairie climate.

This sounds really obvious, but introspection comes slowly to me: somebody who has spent 1,000 hours designing a self-published reference map of Alberta is not actually going to be an authority on what a normal person will find interesting.

Most Wikipedia readers still need to learn the basics:

Alberta has two big cities.
The corridor between them is densely urbanized.
The north and the southeast are emptier.
Most people who live in the northeast are concentrated into the single city of Fort McMurray.

Both maps communicate these facts equally well.

Plus, the boundaries on the simple map correspond to counties and cities, which Albertans are generally aware of. Conversely, few Canadians have ever heard of a census dissemination area.

Which one's better?

Ha ha, nice try. I just said that a phrase like "better map" is incredibly loaded. You won't trick me with that one.

It's another huge mistake to think that maps portray objective truth without the faintest whisper of the creator's personality managing to escape. Remember that nerdy km^-2 label? When I look at both of these maps, I can't avoid thinking about my personal growth and development between 2018 and 2023.

In other words, I probably find my 20-year-old self more annoying than anyone else on the planet.

From my perspective, the purple map is far superior.

Best Alarm Clocks In Saskatchewan In 2025

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I recently bought myself a yellow alarm clock.

One of the pleasures of adulthood is finding out that there are too many choices available for almost every class of consumer product. I usually hear it phrased like this: “has my life really gotten so boring that I get excited when my favourite brand of thermal underwear goes on sale?”

Personally, I really disliked being a child, so I always look at it the exact opposite way: “wow, when I’m given the freedom to choose every minute detail of my own lifestyle, even picking my underwear becomes a new source of joy.” I don't feel like my sense of youthful whimsy has diminished at all. It's just that the sense of control over my own buying power, previously only felt on Christmas and birthdays, has now been extended to fill the entire year.

The problem with the Internet nowadays is that you can't find random forum posts written by real people who are ornery enough to give you their fair impressions of a product. I am filling this gap in my own tiny way.

Everything I want

Here is everything I want in an alarm clock:

Portable.
Not corded.
Aesthetically pleasing. (However I define it. I live in a 1920s home and try to avoid any décor with the “Amazon product look”.)

My budget was nominally around $100, but I've been tempted by stupider things than this before.

As a freelance cartographer, I do a lot of business trips around the Canadian Prairies, so I imagined that a familiar travel alarm clock would help me feel grounded and refreshed when I’m in an unfamiliar budget motel room. (Of course, normal people use their phones for this. It's an entirely separate matter that I have been trying to train myself to sleep a room apart from my Internet device. I was sending too many stupid texts 5 seconds after waking up.)

Actual vintage

My first shot was a mechanical travel alarm clock, probably from the 60s. Just by knowing too much about my personality, you can probably guess that I find mechanical clocks interesting.

This was retro-cool and had a very practical form factor, plus it was a thoughtful Christmas gift. Bad news: its alarm was totally unreliable, which made it unsuitable for business travel. I still had lots of fun tending it for a few months!

Not by choice, I was forced to add an extra bullet point to my spec sheet. The hunt was on.

Quartz movement. (It turns out that things not containing dozens of cool fiddly gears are more dependable.)

Flip clocks

I quickly became enamoured with one particular retro product category: the flip clock. Yes, they are still making these today. Just look at this product listing!

Sadly, a real Twemco is not cheap: $250 shipped to Canada. (These flip clocks, locally produced, apparently became a cherished symbol of corporate Hong Kong in the 70s.)

What about a knockoff? I thought about it, I really did. But the entire point of this research project was to invest in something that would make me happy to interact with every day. And I know from experience that knockoff companies generally cut corners on those tiny details: sloppy typography, flimsy insubstantial button presses, poorly molded plastics.

With some additional qualms about whether the mechanical flip mechanism was really "portable" (can these survive being tossed in a suitcase?), I couldn't justify the extra expense.

I started browsing through various suspiciously SEO-optimized Top 10 lists, most of which did not share my fussy aesthetic priorities at all.

Okay, good on them for actually buying the products and photographing them all together.

It wasn't all slop: scrolling down until I read the phrase "design enthusiasts" pointed me towards Japan’s Lemnos brand, which specializes in modernist industrial design and apparently doesn't try all that hard to market itself overseas.

Made in Japan

I love the total apathy that Japanese corporations seem to have towards actually selling the things that they manufacture. The Lemnos corporate website proudly announces that Lemnos clocks are "available only at the finest stores and art museums in North America". Oh... okay.

You can also buy them directly from the manufacturer, but the UI doesn't work very hard to point you there.

I am sure they have some practical marketing reason to try and limit distribution to a better sort of retailer, but since you're reading this blog post on what is ultimately a direct-to-consumer sales website, I can't say that I personally relate to this model.

There are some very entertaining products buried deep inside the Lemnos catalogue. This is the one I would immediately buy if I was rich:

However, selecting for alarm functionality thins the field down to seven entries, all reasonably worthy of a design award, and most within my budget.

The Meteor is probably the most handsome, but I've been going with a brass-and-mustard theme on my main floor, so I went straight for the most colourful option and grabbed the Farbe in yellow. (If you like primary colours, it is also available in a navy blue.)

For god knows what reason, after being told all over the Internet that this thing would cost me USD $100, I was able to find it on eBay for USD $62. That's a reasonable $93 in real dollars. Against all the odds, I really did stay inside my budget.

(Two weeks later, the company released a version that's twice as big and comes with a push button on the top.)

Is it any good?

The problem with forum product reviews is the sunk cost fallacy: if I wasn't mad enough to return it, I've probably convinced myself to like it. I have used my alarm clock daily since buying it. (Actually, being self-employed is such an awesome lifestyle, the truth is that I only need to set an alarm about once or twice a week.)

At my current stage of interior designer evolution, I think the minimal design and bright yellow colour strike the right balance of neutral and silly. It's certainly noticeable, but it won't completely break the immersion of a pre-war or mid-century theme, like I think a digital clock would. (My concern about effectively portraying any particular era in my room is a long way off, as I am currently sleeping on Ikea's cheapest bedframe.)

As a reward for reading to the bottom, here's a photo you apparently won't find anywhere else on the internet: the back panel of the Farbe. A too-fiddly set of controls could easily be a deal-breaker for a small device like this. Note there is no snooze button (a plus for me, as I wanted something very simple).

The tactile feeling of setting the alarm knob is nice and heavy. It comes with four soft click points per hour, meaning that you can only really set the alarm to 15-minute intervals. This suits me fine and I find it vastly preferable to a digital alarm interface, to the point where I find myself using this clock for all kinds of alarms around my house. (Certainly, in my daily routine, there is no point at which I would ever need to wake up at exactly 8:19.)

There is one mild nuisance: the alarm can only be turned off by operating a small toggle switch. This is much less inconvenient on a battery-powered device where I can just pick the entire thing up, but it would be fatal on something that needs to permanently live on my nightstand. On such a small device, it would be a little smarter if the alarm setting knob was placed further from the alarm toggle.

To replace the battery, the white panel pops off with a satisfying friction fit. (Friction fits are a sign of expensive precision machinery, and are the type of thing where knockoff products will usually deliver a much worse experience.)

As is very frequently the case in this industry, the industrial design comes from Lemnos but the electronic timekeeping unit is manufactured by Rhythm. So, my complaints about user experience should probably be addressed to a completely different faceless Japanese conglomerate.

A few months after purchase, I have indeed taken my alarm clock to many budget motels, and I find that it still makes me happy every day to pick it up and fiddle with it. In this respect, I would personally recommend this product.

The last word

Do you respect my desire for a simple battery-operated alarm clock, but question my minimal taste? Check out the Rhythm Rock n' Roll Chicken, also available on eBay for $99.

House Number Hunting in Vancouver

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I recently had a free day in downtown Vancouver. Yes, this really is how I spend all my vacations!

Unlike my research excursions in Saskatchewan and Alberta, this was not a road trip, so at my Val Marie base station I got very invested in the task of planning the perfect route for my limited time in the city.

Route planning

Go figure, Vancouver is actually a step behind Edmonton and Regina in terms of making tax roll build year data easily available to the public. I eagerly look forward to being proven wrong on this point, but I wasn't personally able to find any kind of scrapeable official city interface. In the absence of primary-source municipal data, I relied on Jens von Bergmann's highly neat interactive assessment map.

Just by eyeballing the assessment data, we can identify five main areas of interest in the city where old residential stock predominates. Of these, the Strathcona neighbourhood is (theoretically) far and away the most historical, where pre-1910 construction is widespread. The other four are about equally tied for second, fitting into our pre-Depression era of interest.

Does my background as a GIS person make me an exceptional route planner? It's more like the exact opposite... I tend to enjoy the experience of being aimlessly lost, so I'm actually a very frustrating person to hang out with. Don't read any secret industry knowledge into my process here.

First priority: hitting up Strathcona.
Second priority: heading to any other target area.
Last priority: with only a single day at our disposal, Kitsilano's geographic distance from Strathcona makes it easy to strike off the list.

With the Vancouver airport train making transit access to downtown easy, I decided to pick Grandview-Woodland as my backup area, setting up an ambitious 16-kilometer day hike for myself.

Note: Unlike most Western Canadian railway-era neighbourhoods, which are laid out along a single axis, Strathcona has houses facing in all four directions off each block. This makes systematically walking past every house in the area a big nuisance, and I definitely missed a few.

Ground truth

The complexity of my plan exceeded the durability of my feet. After about 9 kilometers (and having not taken off my boots since leaving home in Val Marie), I decided to give up, and only managed to hit a few blocks worth of Grandview-Woodland.

From some very blurry Streetview captures, I expected to find some type of original house number sign in Vancouver, but I wasn't sure exactly what. Here's one of the locations that I identified before ever setting foot in British Columbia:

You can see a bit of an odd reflection on this plate, which I mistook for a hint that the fixture has a slightly convex shape. From there, I speculated that we were looking at an enamel material, similar to what I documented in Regina and Moose Jaw. Wrong!

The real answer was a few hundred dollars in airfare away:

Fifteen of my 20 observations are all constructed in exactly the same way. This is Vancouver's most widespread heritage house number style!

I am really not the most handy person, but I am apparently gradually becoming a subject matter expert in heritage sign manufacturing techniques. Let's puzzle over what we've documented.

Making history

Just like in Edmonton, Vancouver's oldest house number plates are made out of painted foil under glass, held together by a scalloped metal bracket. However, unlike Edmonton, Vancouver plates are modular! Each digit is on a separate pane of glass.

I would have assumed that this modular style was developed for easier mass-production, but it's clear that each digit has been individually shaped by an (experienced) human hand holding a sharp blade. The most obvious proof is provided by this plate with two consecutive digits:

Even accounting for the way that foil signs tend to sag and fall apart over the decades, these two 4s are just not identical. However, the modular construction of the digits provides much more regularity than in Edmonton, where wonky kerning was one of the biggest tip-offs that every single one of these signs is bespoke.

One other neat innovation with the Vancouver plates: the foil comes with a very attractive tooled guilloché pattern. I didn't see this anywhere in the hundreds of foil plates I photographed in Edmonton, so it was most likely the house specialty of a long-gone Lower Mainland sign shop.

At first, I thought this beautiful rippled texture was the result of some complex metallurgical technique, but a closer inspection reveals a consistency to the grooves that implicates a machine. In Edmonton, the foil itself has been cut into the shape of the digits, but in Vancouver we can see that each digit comes with a full-sized rectangular piece of this special guilloché foil. So either the black glass paint was somehow scored and removed by hand, or these were manufactured with a single-use stencil that was discarded after its work was complete. (In either case, I am not sure why some kind of die or template couldn't have done a better job.)

Odd ones out

I briefly mentioned that 15 of my 20 house number observations all match each other. What about the rest?

829 is a vintage blue enamel sign, similar to what I've documented in Moose Jaw and Regina - although, with its unusual digit forms, it definitely doesn't come from either of those two prairie sign shops. It's also being kept behind frosted glass, so there's no proof that it was ever actually mounted on this building.

The remaining four oddballs are all very close to the glass signage we see in Edmonton, with slightly wonky numbers all applied to a single glass plate. I have documented slight variations in these kinds of signs all over the Canadian prairies, so they were probably being manufactured everywhere, and I can imagine multiple shops in Vancouver specializing in the same product.

429, in particular, is a ringer for Edmonton's airbrushed "serif" style of sign... although I actually don't think it's a perfect match (the thickness of the strokes looks different).

Finally, although 653 is clearly a modular glass sign like its other neighbours, it trades its guilloché pattern for a pretty celestial design. This implies multiple sources of decorative foil in turn-of-the-last-century British Columbia.

From observations in Edmonton, we know that these scalloped glass plates and brackets can be manufactured in any custom size if needed, so perhaps the availability of this patterned foil is what dictated the consistent, modular shape of the digits that we see in Vancouver?

Conclusion

Not bad for a single day!

As a self-employed person and my own boss, I rarely feel like my time is precious, so it was very entertaining to do a lot of prep work for a structured and limited-time event. It is always a joy to do a piece of desktop GIS analysis (e.g. identifying parts of Vancouver that should theoretically yield old architectural fixtures) and find the results corroborated by reality.

When it comes to house numbering in Vancouver, the frequency of a single common house number plate style (and the exclusion of other styles common to other cities) once again implies that the city government was originally involved somewhere. Because Vancouver is a large commercial and intellectual centre, I am holding out hope for the existence of archival resources that will one day help me reconstruct a more specific narrative of policy and procurement.

This makes four Canadian cities now conclusively documented by myself as having an original house number style, and I have to admit I am still having a lot of fun becoming the world expert in this subject. For how completely archaic and forgotten these heritage sign manufacturing techniques are, it's amazing how present they are in our modern landscape!!

Having pushed my heels to their natural limits, I regretted this excursion for the rest of my vacation.

House Number Hunting in Moose Jaw

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What? They're in Moose Jaw too??!

Here are the M.J. basics: this small city is just 45 minutes from Regina, the provincial capital. The two communities used to have a fearsome rivalry, but the matter is essentially settled today, as Regina is 7 times larger and enjoys the international airport, the Costco, the symphony orchestra, and so on. This means that the city was heavily built up in the booming 1920s (we're not going to let losing the Provincial Legislature stop us!!) and has seen very little downtown redevelopment since then, creating a lovely historical main street nearly unparalleled in Canada.

So yes, there are old house number plates in Moose Jaw. As of this writing, I've documented 55 of them.

With most of the city's core being built out before the Depression, Moose Jaw has been one of the most fruitful places for house number hunting yet, beaten only by (don't tell them!!) the Heritage area of Regina.

Study area	Number plate density
Regina (Heritage)	76.2 per km²
Moose Jaw (West)	40.9 per km²
Vancouver (Strathcona)	38.5 per km²
Regina (Cathedral)	29.3 per km²
Edmonton (North)	25.3 per km²
Moose Jaw (East)	25.1 per km²
Edmonton (Strathcona)	14.9 per km²
Swift Current	12.6 per km²

Notice some cities on this list that haven't gotten a blog post yet? Consider sending me a nice email to encourage me to keep writing up the results of my field expeditions...

Physical manufacture

Let's get a closer look at one of these Moose Jaw plates. As with Regina, we are looking at a typical turn-of-the-last-century enamel sign, with a blue porcelain shell deposited around a steel substrate.

I promise I won't read a rivalry with Regina into every aspect of this blog post, but when we look at a typical Regina house number plate, the similarities are unmistakable:

...as are the minor differences. After some additional fieldwork (realizing I forgot to pack a ruler and taking multiple idiotic photos of my hand holding my pocketknife up to a random person's house), here are the typical attributes of the signs in both cities.

Moose Jaw plates are smaller, more square, and the numerals are a little more aesthetically pleasing, with a scalloped serif cut out of every "1". Moose Jaw also makes use of a technical innovation not found anywhere in Regina: the grommet.

The porcelain surface of these enamel signs is impressively weather-resistant, but they're extremely vulnerable to punctures, which expose the metal substrate underneath. Nail holes are a major vulnerability of Regina's house number signs, almost all of which can be seen with significant corrosion damage after a century of being exposed to the elements (although I didn't see any whose structural integrity seems to be yet at risk).

Conversely, in forward-thinking Moose Jaw, every sign typically comes with four protective metal rings. Smart move! The average house number plate in Moose Jaw is in much better condition than in Regina. This might be another reason why they survive in such large numbers here.

A mystery object

Although Moose Jaw's house number plates are very self-consistent in their size, style, and typography, I managed to find one truly weird object in situ on Stadacona Street.

This is the spitting image of an old Edmonton house number plate, but it's so badly degraded that whatever it once contained is completely illegible. I think I see an upper line of hand-lettered text, but none of the letterforms match the name of the street.

We know that Edmonton foil-and-glass signs were available on the private market, and that they were used for more than just house numbers (I've previously photographed one that said "NO AGENTS"). I speculate that this thing might have once displayed a family name, but it's also possible that the four sort-of-visible A's and R's here are just the remnant of some decorative pattern.

Conclusion

Given the ubiquity of these blue plates in the historical core of Moose Jaw, and the relative absence of other types of old house number signs, I am comfortable concluding that Moose Jaw is yet another Canadian city where the municipal government was originally involved in the distribution of a standard house number plate. Without further information, these plates were most likely handed out in the prosperous 1920s.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find any Moose Jaw tax roll information online, so without another research trip to the city, it's difficult to do any further analytical work. With the relatively good physical condition of these number plates, it's hard to guess when they might have stopped being issued by the city.

The close proximity of Regina and Moose Jaw makes a useful case study: not a single Regina-style enamel sign can be spotted in Moose Jaw, and not a single Moose Jaw-style enamel sign can be spotted in Regina. If these nearby rivals issued two similar-but-different styles of house number sign, it is very likely that both cities had their own local sign shops. This indicates that enamel sign manufacturing was not extremely specialized technology, and a large number of specialty sign shops are likely to have existed in pre-Depression Canada - each, no doubt, with their own aesthetic preferences and typographical quirks.

Old House Numbers in Edmonton

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A couple weeks of chilly midday walks, two archive visits, and 139 geo-located photos. In late December, I had walked a large portion of Old Strathcona looking for old fixtures, and by mid-January, I made my first visit to the City archives. This final post contains all that I currently have to say about old house numbers in Edmonton.

What we know from the streets

If you walk through any pre-war neighbourhood in Edmonton, you'll eventually start to see a particular type of foil-and-glass house number repeated over and over and over - but only on the oldest houses. There are plenty of subtle stylistic differences between them, but they're all made of shiny silver foil pressed underneath a scalloped glass plate. This strongly implies some kind of common origin.

Here's a complete map showing every single one that I've documented to date.

When I did a similar project in Regina, I discovered that old houses in that city were originally issued white-on-blue enamel number signs, which are totally absent from Edmonton. (In the other direction, I spotted one scalloped foil-and-glass number plate in Regina, but I didn't think to get a photo of it!!)

So we know these signs were widespread, we know their style varies regionally, and we know from common sense that addresses are usually regulated in some capacity by the local government. But we don't have all the answers about where they came from. Manufactured in-house? Preferred contractor?

Luckily, the City of Edmonton Archives exist, and (at least nominally) contain plenty of leads.

What we know from the Archives

Edmonton adopted its modern addressing system in 1914, shortly after the annexation of neighbouring Strathcona. If we dig up historical addressing bylaws, some key language strongly implies that foil-and-glass house numbers were subsidized by the city (for fifty cents!) between 1928 and 1955, explaining why one style is so consistently found everywhere. The old bylaw text also confirms that homeowners were always free to improvise their own numbers, so we should NOT expect to see one on every single old house in the city.

I made a second visit to the Archives later in January, but it was mostly a bust. I requested to see every single contract and piece of correspondence related to house numbers or sign shops from the 1920s to the 1950s. Smart, right? My hands were almost trembling as I opened up a letter from October 1927 sent to the Commissioners by the city's oldest sign shop. Surely this would be the original document where a major corporate player lobbied for what would become the 1928 house numbering bylaw!

Nope... Clyde A. Hook was just complaining to the authorities about the road in front of his storefront being crappy. Plus ça change.

I also found some Bylaws Committee correspondence from 1947, complaining that the placing of numbers on houses has "no uniformity" and that the use of luminous paint is "in an experimental stage". I thought I would be digging up these archival sources so I wouldn't have to make vague assumptions based on tone, but from the sound of this letter, the City was still expected to have significant procurement power over house numbers in this era.

By this time, foiled glass was already long out of fashion, and a big municipal contract was very possibly the only thing keeping the guy who made them from retiring. It's not surprising that the last straw may have been new postwar technologies coming on the scene - although we know from living in the future that advanced retro-reflective materials fill the niche today that Mayor Ainlay expected to see occupied by phosphorescent paint.

I was also able to view the original copy of one interesting item, an old photo showing (very incidentally) an old number plate in the wild.

It turns out the definition on these old film cameras is very good in the proper lighting!

As a final Hail Mary, the Archives also had two copies of Edmonton's 1930s building code, something which is no longer a municipal matter anywhere outside Vancouver. The old Code books were pretty funny (asbestos curtains!) but number plates are not structural elements, nor are they required for safety. No mention of addressing could be turned up.

Key street finds

What on earth motivated me to get so systematic with this project? Sometimes, you just come across a unique item that challenges your basic assumptions, and it makes the hunt much more interesting.

Visiting the City Archives was helpful, but I found no specification or tender proving that the City ever made any direct decisions about the form and function of these numbers. So, although they clearly are a standard, it's an informal one. The exact relationship between the City and its preferred contractor(s) must be deduced by other means.

Perhaps some of the most unusual items in my historic inventory will provide clues...

Extra Verbose

These were the first street finds that made me wonder how standardized these plates really were. By craftsmanship these are clearly related to their shorter brethren - but what's with the whole street number tacked onto the end?? Did ratepayers have the option of paying more than fifty cents to make their sign look more appealing?

Out of 139 numbers, these are the only two of their kind, so more data is not forthcoming. Their respective build years are 1950 and 1960.

Double Decker

Another completely unique sign, here the street number occupies a whole second line. This is on a 1930 build.

Having survived in fairly good condition, this sign also betrays its layered construction: you can see that the maker was economical with the textured foil and only applied small rectangles of it where needed.

Cinderella Sign

Stamp collectors have a whimsical name for any stamp-like object that lacks government authorization: a "cinderella". This strangely familiar "No Agents" sign is displayed on a 1949 low-rise apartment building.

Bingo!! Sometimes I'm not the fastest thinker. The previous few mutant signs caught my attention, but I figured that they still could have fit into some kind of municipal code - maybe the City was just incoherent, and changed its requirements at random times over the years. This is the object that made me realize that private sign shops played a leading role in establishing Edmonton's house number standard.

Its construction and appearance are identical to dozens of number plates I photographed all around the city, but there is no reason why the City of Edmonton would have any financial stake in installing a "No Agents" sign on a private residence. Here is direct proof that layered foil and glass were a house specialty of at least one Edmonton sign shop, and they made them in this fashion whenever they felt like it.

So far, this is the only object of its kind that I've been able to locate, but any surviving Edmonton sign from the 1950s could fit the bill - indoors or outdoors! Keep your eyes peeled!!

Unbalanced

This ugly thing appears to be a simple misprint: its top margin is way too thick. It certainly merits inclusion in my rogue's gallery of weird, unique signs, but I mostly just wonder why it still got produced like this. I suspect it was a leftover piece of glass, close enough to spec that removing the thin upper edge would have risked compromising the remainder.

A basic typology

Now that you've seen the very weirdest and most memorable of the bunch, here's how I classified the rest. With 139 photographs in total, I count 7 reasonably distinctive categories containing at least 2 self-similar plates.

Plain (64 plates)

The largest category is also the most questionable. Slightly less than half of my observed plates are broadly regular.

Because each one of these signs is hand-made, there's a lot of variation inside this category. It's possible to try and subdivide it further, but unlike in Regina where we can see a fluid painter's hand at work, here we're dealing with blade-cut pieces of foil pressed directly onto the glass. This is a finicky, geometric process and I am much less confident about reading an individual artisan's craft into any particular typographic quirk.

With each of these plates being a fully bespoke object, we see slightly different dimensions and aspect ratios being employed across the run. Edmonton's random mix of 4- and 5-digit address numbers doesn't make things any more consistent.

In a perfect world, this category could be further subdivided using absolute measurements and close analysis of the foil texture of every plate. In practice, many plates are in inaccessible locations, and they've degraded into such a state that it's difficult to reconstruct exactly how they might have appeared when new.

Deluxe (28 plates)

These plates make up the largest and most obvious subcategory: they all have attractive red trim (sometimes faded) and a two-tone finish on each number. Both of these steps require a deft hand with a knife and add additional manufacturing complexity. It's difficult to imagine these being sold for exactly the same price as their plain brethren.

Worth noting: 11506 has a little black pip on each of its corners, making the trim effect even more decorative. I haven't observed this complication anywhere else in Edmonton.

Serif (22 plates)

Flash forward: suddenly these digits are looking very regular indeed. Forget about the labourious hand-cutting process, our sign shop has switched over to a set of regular stencils and an airbrush. This is newer technology, matching the WWII-era build years that these are generally screwed onto.

Although the stencils must have saved a lot of work, there is one major downside with these plates: they just haven't held up as well. The paint tends to flake off the crumpled foil surface, and this style category can become nearly unreadable in a way that the more traditional number plates never do. (Survivorship bias! It's also possible that the traditional plates fail catastrophically rather than gradually.)

Curved Sides (6 plates)

These seem to correlate with older tax years and are breaking down in an unusual way: is that paper inside 11008? They're so trashed that I haven't been able to reverse-engineer their exact manufacture. 10934 holds the odd distinction of having disintegrated in the most colourful way of any plate I have a photo of.

Obnoxiously, 5 out of these 6 have a fairly distinctive 2-short 5-long scalloping pattern... but of course, there's an odd one out. The curved sides are otherwise such a unifying design element!! Keep your secrets!!

Notched (6 plates)

These plates all have distinctive notched "1"s and a finely crumpled texture. Curves are hard to produce with a knife: the number forms are very inconsistent.

It took me a bit of thought to realize that 9539 also belonged in this set, but luckily we can compare the 5 to 11541.

New (3 plates)

This style really annoys me. It's unique in its construction: no scallops. The aluminum bracket is a distinctively more modern feature than you see on all the other number plates. It just looks like you would expect to find it at the end of the run. But the tax years don't back me up on the chronology: these three houses are from 1911, 1920, and 1930.

Even more strangely, two of these are right next door to each other!!

Old Serif (2 plates)

As we reach the "categories" that have no more than two members, things necessarily start to get a little more spurious. I'm not sure that they are genetically related, but these two signs both share an unusual serifed "1" that doesn't match the rest of the population at all.

Despite their similar typography, 10806 is crumbling in a way that indicates the foil was spray-painted using a stencil, while 11724 appears to have been painted directly onto the glass in a more conventional manner.

D.I.Y. (9 plates)

A number of plates have been inexpertly repaired over the years, as their layered construction is tantalizingly able to be taken apart by an amateur. These oddballs, in addition to being a little entertaining, often provide valuable insight about how these plates were fabricated by their original manufacturer. 9941 cleverly uses modern retro-reflective material, while I suspect that 10642 is a wartime Serif plate whose original (faulty) ink was carefully blown off.

There are a few other borderline objects that might have been inspired by an original number plate, but here I only include those where it's obvious that some original hardware has been retained. Although the scalloped glass-bracket connection on these plates always looks a bit insubstantial to me, it is clearly a fairly robust and repairable arrangement that's able to survive being opened up more than once.

And one really unique one

This plate doesn't fit the rest at all, but I include it here because of its glass construction, familiar dimensions, and the fact that it is attached to a 1923 house. Somehow, it reminds me of a bank.

Category geography

Having delineated all these categories, is there any discernible spatial trend to them?

As far as I can tell, no... but it's wonderful that we checked! That's science, baby.

Interviews and the Aftermarket

In a very informal fashion, I personally spoke to two operators in Edmonton who specialize in demolition and architectural salvage, ideally hoping that they might have one of these things sitting in the back room. Both were very familiar with what I was inquiring after.

One was VERY enthusiastic about my project to document these old numbers, promised to take down my contact information for the next time they came across one, and offered to promote any kind of replica that I would be able to manufacture.

The other confessed to habitually throwing these old plates away, as they are invariably very degraded. (Painful as it is to hear, this is true. Only a handful of my 139 photos represent a condition that I would call presentable.)

Slightly disappointing, but it only took a couple months of similar work in Regina to stumble across an original number plate for sale at an antique mall in a different city. I'll keep looking!

Chronology and data science

Let's put all the pieces together, and prepare for the day I'm back in Edmonton and I'm bored enough to try and complete my inventory.

Our historic bylaws and our street observations generally agree that these number plates are not found on anything built after the mid-50s, so our area of interest can easily be winnowed down to territory controlled by the City of Edmonton in that era:

If we want to systematically look for old municipal-issued fixtures, we'll want to use City tax records to find where old buildings exist inside this area. The pre-1955 map looks like this:

Post-war suburbanization explosively changed the form of almost every Canadian city. If we just filter out addresses built between 1945 and 1955, we find that most of the city's pre-1955 footprint was built in a single decade:

These post-war neighbourhoods might contain the thing I'm looking for, but we'd expect the pickings to be slimmer, and with larger lot sizes these areas are less convenient to walk through. So, on a practical level, I concentrated my search to Edmonton's much smaller stock of pre-1945 architecture. This is the familiar shape of "old" Edmonton as it appeared on maps for a few decades, except for the core, where almost all old buildings have been obliterated by redevelopment.

I was able to personally survey about 50% of these hot-spots. Not bad for a personal project that absolutely nobody asked me to do! On my next trip into the city, I would really like to walk through Highlands and Westmount, two relatively isolated old regions that were built out before the war.

Building age chronology

Let's take a look at how the ages of buildings with old number plates compare to the ages of all buildings in our study area:

As in Regina, we see that the peaks and troughs agree pretty closely... until we reach a sharp cut-off. Unlike in Regina, there was much more development in the core area in the 40s and 50s. This histogram strongly suggests that our number plates stopped being issued in the mid-1950s.

In Regina, old number plates are sometimes re-used on new buildings, presumably because owners or contractors recognize their heritage value. In Edmonton, I found one very obvious infill where the old number was proudly retained, as well as a couple conspicuously new exteriors where the City thinks that the underlying structure is original. But overall, I would say that Regina beats Edmonton when it comes to examples of conscious preservation. Artsy Strathcona is simply higher-income and more intensively redeveloped than Regina's Cathedral is.

The difference might also come down to the physical materials: Regina number plates are solid metal and can survive a drop, Edmonton number plates are glass and are frequently seen cracked. (This hasn't prevented a couple home-owners from leaving theirs precariously balanced on top of a railing. Yikes!)

Category chronology

Are there any temporal trends that connect the different plate categories?

It's frustratingly hard to tell. Out of our three biggest categories, the observation I'm most confident making is that the Deluxe category is scattered much more evenly throughout our period of interest. The Plain and Serif categories are both disproportionately present in the war years, corresponding to a wartime and postwar building boom that we know was happening across the whole city.

I suspect that a bit more analytical work could probably untangle a Plain sub-category uniquely constrained to the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, see my previous observation about the difficulty of analyzing the craftsmanship behind these badly degraded objects.

Conclusion

Edmonton has an original style of house number plate that is distinctively tied to the city's early history, affixed onto a variety of buildings between 1928 and 1955. Although the city was directly involved with distributing them for below cost, no surviving documents could be located dealing the exact nature of the business relationship between the municipality and any of its established local sign shops. Their foil-and-glass construction represents a "house style" that was common to one or more private artisans in the first half of the 20th century.

Based on an inventory of 139 geo-located photographs, these plates can be arranged into 7 stylistic categories. Some of these appear to be tied to particular age ranges, either because of statistical patterns in the construction year of their host buildings, or because their construction reflects different stages of technological advancement. Efforts to replicate some of these original methods of manufacture are currently underway.

With a few weeks to kill, a data science background, and a decent pair of boots, you too can completely fail to include any do-nothing days in your Christmas vacation plans.

Grid Cartogram Secrets

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

If you've followed my work for a serious length of time, you've probably seen a lot of one of my favourite election mapping tools: the grid cartogram. I have made so many of these things over the years that I've almost forgotten how to explain the basics... but let's try anyway, because I wouldn't mind seeing cool election maps become more widespread.

Cartogram basics

The premise of any cartogram is simple: distort space to illustrate some other variable. Among other applications, this is a natural fit for the logic of a first-past-the-post election, where every legislator is assigned to one district. A distorted map that shows every electoral district at the same size, therefore, is going to give us a very useful overview of partisan strength in our legislature.

You may have seen approximately one gajillion catchy data visualizations over the years explaining that population density is not the same everywhere, and honestly if you are reading a cartography blog for fun I am not sure I need to bother explaining this concept any further. But if you want to look at visualizations of the 2016 U.S. presidential election until you shoot yourself, check out Kenneth Field's Thematic Mapping, available through ESRI Press.

There are other types of cartogram not covered here but I like grid cartograms for these reasons:

A square just inherently looks like A Unit Thing
A map full of squares looks like it's showing you Many Unit Things
A lot of our administrative boundaries in Canada are already rectilinear
Our language has four cardinal directions embedded into it
Squares tessellate easily

Cartogram complexities

If only every electoral district was just like Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston. This mostly rural patch of Eastern Ontario elects 1 out of 124 MPPs, and its land area tidily accounts for about 1/124th of the province.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the full truth is more inconvenient.

The disparity in Ontario is visually obvious, but running the actual numbers is impressive too!

Region	MPPs	Area
North	13 (10.5%)	876,800 km² (88.8%)
GTA	53 (42.7%)	2,400 km² (0.2%)

The average northern MPP represents 1,500 times more land area than the average GTA MPP.

There is no agreed-upon way to transform real geography into a distorted grid, and we live in an urbanized society where population density varies dramatically. In one sense, a cartogram never lies, but in most of the New World this comes at the cost of cartograms being fairly difficult to interpret.

Personally, I see them as an acquired taste. Not the most intuitive way to convey information at a glance to laypeople, but once you get used to them, it's hard to give up the habit.

(It's a different story in the United Kingdom, a country whose population density is much closer to homogenous. I knew that U.K. election cartograms achieved mainstream popularity in the 2010s, but while writing this post, I was shocked to uncover an example that was published in a major newspaper in 1895.)

For jurisdictions with extreme and sharp distinctions in population density, it's also possible to make your cartograms a little more readable by using insets. That's what I tried to do with one of the first cartograms I ever made, way back in 2020.

Why does this work? Exurbanization hasn't progressed very far in Saskatchewan, where Saskatoon and Regina are still greedily annexing new development land. With most new homes getting built inside the province's two cities proper, there are a lot of small urban ridings, a lot of large rural ridings, and not a lot of intermediate geography in between. (This started to change following the 2022 electoral boundary redistribution, after which the new ridings of Martensville-Blairmore, Warman, and White City-Qu'Appelle can all be considered fundamentally exurban.)

There is more to the art of arranging cartogram grid squares, and I have seen some algorithms that automatically calculate a trade-off between accurate topology and a recognizable outer shape, but I do it completely manually.

The biggest trick I use is purely artistic: just a couple squares can make the difference, serving as obvious shape-recognition "tells" that make the final cartogram clearly resemble the outline of Ontario, or Wales, or whatever your specific area of interest is. Here are some key details that I feel are necessary for making the United Kingdom immediately recognizable, even though we are distorting the relative scale of different areas quite a bit:

Balogh Pál

This is why I like the internet!!

Years ago, I randomly came across a striking Hungarian demographic map from 1902, which had been re-interpreted into a modern European election map. A fairly typical nationalistic project from this era of Central European history, it is also a remarkable early implementation of using 100 colourful grid squares to express percentages drawn from a complex dataset. If you know your historical geography, you can even pick out the shape of modern Hungary in red.

As soon as I ever laid eyes on this map format, I thought it would be perfect for Canadian election results, which share a few crucial features with Hungarian demography:

A complex picture with more than two dominant players
Very strong regionalism where some major parties barely register in certain parts of the country
People only ever care about a few marginal areas that could go either way
Weird nationalists will uncomfortably stare into your eyes and ramble about the topic for 5 hours

In my opinion, one of the best innovations here is the visual distinction between pluralities (<50%) and majorities (>50%). In addition to being academically interesting (the idea of narrow plurality victories is one of the most common moral arguments against the first-past-the-post voting system), it works really well on a map. By putting minorities in the centre of a majority grid square, a large swath of majority territories will form a continuous fabric of a single colour.

This is actually a little different from Pál's methodology, which seems to rotate grid squares randomly, or maybe based on local context. In 1902 there was no hope of automating any of this process, so it's possible that the original map is simply inconsistent by its nature.

Mass-producing grid cartograms

All cartograms distort space by their nature and start to push the boundaries of what a "map" is, therefore GIS software is not really the best tool for creating them. You are probably going to want to discover some way to programmatically work with a vector graphics editor.

In my case, I was already using Inkscape over Illustrator just because I'm cheap - but it turns out Inkscape's .svg editing chops are highly compatible with a number of other .svg manipulation tools, like Python's svgwrite library. If you are not super familiar with the .svg format, this script will probably not make a lot of sense to you, but at least it should run! Let's go through it notebook style.

As input, this program takes .csv election data in this format:

District name	Party 1	Party 2	Etc.
Alert	304	100	50
Bell	549	601	5
Cabri	283	301	300
Delta	123	261	294

Like most projects I write, we are going to need to import the pandas library because I'm not a real CS major.

import pandas as pd
import svgwrite

First we initialize some kind of riding object that we can manipulate...

# Create custom riding class

class Riding:
    def __init__(self, name, voteTotals, parties):
        self.name = name
        self.totalVotes = pd.Series(data=voteTotals, index=parties).astype(float)
        self.votePercents = self._getRemainders()

In order to turn a potentially complex dataset into 100 perfect little squares, we need to perform least-remainder percentage rounding. This is a little bit more complicated than normal rounding because we need to be sure that the final result adds up to 100 (it's very easy to accidentally get 99 or 101 if we rely on our elementary school knowledge and just use .5 as a breakpoint).

    # Do least remainder percentage rounding

    def _getRemainders(self):
        rawPercents = 100 * self.totalVotes / self.totalVotes.sum()
        roundPercents = rawPercents.astype(int)
        remainders = rawPercents - roundPercents
        outstandingPercents = 100 - roundPercents.sum()
        outstandingParties = remainders.nlargest(outstandingPercents).index
        roundPercents[outstandingParties] += 1
        
        return roundPercents

These two fields will soon come in handy.

    # Calculate some other useful fields
    
    def winningParty(self):
        return self.totalVotes.idxmax()
    
    def hasMajority(self):
        return self.totalVotes[self.winningParty()] / self.totalVotes.sum() > 0.5

We're done with class Riding, now let's create something that will navigate through our svg image and add coloured rectangles to it.

# Create a snake function that draws coloured squares

def Snake(startingPoint, rowlengths, colours, orientation, grp, dwg, cell_width):
    n = 0
    horizontalPosition = startingPoint[0]
    for row_index, row in enumerate(rowlengths):
        for step in range(row):
            if (row_index+orientation)%2 == 0:
                horizontalPosition = horizontalPosition + 10
                grp.add(dwg.rect((horizontalPosition - 10, startingPoint[1] - row_index*10), (10, 10), fill=colours[n], stroke=colours[n], stroke_width=cell_width))
            else:
                horizontalPosition = horizontalPosition - 10
                grp.add(dwg.rect((horizontalPosition, startingPoint[1] - row_index*10), (10, 10), fill=colours[n], stroke=colours[n], stroke_width=cell_width))
            n += 1

Now we define an election_cartogram function. This function needs to be given a dictionary of party colours, an input filename, an indication of which column in our input file contains the district names, an output filename, and a small line width parameter to remove tiny visual gaps in the output .svg file.

def election_cartogram(brand_colours, filename, label_column, output_filename, cell_width=0.3):

    # Import data
    
    election = pd.read_csv(filename, engine='c')
    
    # Remove empty rows and columns
    
    numbers = election.drop(label_column,axis=1)
    
    election = election.loc[(numbers!=0).any(axis=1)]
    
    election = election.dropna(axis='rows',how='all')
    election = election.dropna(axis='columns',how='all')
    
    # Create an array of ridings using our custom class
    
    ridings = [Riding(row[label_column], row.drop(labels=[label_column]), row.drop(labels=[label_column]).index) for _, row in election.iterrows()]
    
    # We are now ready to start drawing shapes!

    # Let's make some rules to arrange the output in a nice grid.
       
    layout_width = int(len(ridings)**0.5)
    
    # And initialize the svg...
    
    dwg = svgwrite.Drawing(output_filename, size=(layout_width*110 - 10,int(1 + len(ridings)/layout_width)*110 - 10), profile="tiny")

And here's where we iterate through every spreadsheet row and turn it into a picture!! This is a fairly unwieldy chunk of code that could probably be improved by a smarter person - most of these lines are spent manually defining the shape of the exact spiral that we want our script to produce for those complex majority ridings. (We're going to need a slightly different shape for every single majority value from 50% to 100%.)

    for riding_index,riding in enumerate(ridings):
        
       # Implement grid positioning.
        
       pos_x = (riding_index % layout_width) * 110
       pos_y = int(riding_index/layout_width) * 110
        
       # Check which party has the most votes.
            
       sort_order = riding.totalVotes.sort_values(ascending=False).index
       sorted_colours = pd.Series(brand_colours).reindex(sort_order,fill_value=brand_colours['Other'])
       colour = sorted_colours.repeat(riding.votePercents.reindex(sort_order))
        
        # Put what we're about to draw into an svg group.
        
       grp = dwg.g()
    
    # Find out if the winning party has a majority or not...
    
       if riding.hasMajority():
           
           step = 0
         
            # This giant block of statements just describes a spiral.
                
           while step <= riding.votePercents[riding.totalVotes.idxmax()] - 1:
                step_colour = colour.iat[0]
                colour = colour.iloc[1:]
                if step >= 0 and step <= 9:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((0 + pos_x, 90 - step*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 10 and step <= 18:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((10 + (step-10)*10 + pos_x, 0 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 19 and step <= 27:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((90 + pos_x, 10 + (step-19)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 28 and step <= 35:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((80 - (step-28)*10 + pos_x, 90 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 36 and step <= 43:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((10 + pos_x, 80 - (step-36)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 44 and step <= 50:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((20 + (step-44)*10 + pos_x, 10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 51 and step <= 57:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((80 + pos_x, 20 + (step-51)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 58 and step <= 63:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((70 - (step-58)*10 + pos_x, 80 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 64 and step <= 69:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((20 + pos_x, 70 - (step-64)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 70 and step <= 74:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((30 + (step-70)*10 + pos_x, 20 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 75 and step <= 79:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((70 + pos_x, 30 + (step-75)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 80 and step <= 83:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((60 - (step-80)*10 + pos_x, 70 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 84 and step <= 87:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((30 + pos_x, 60 - (step-84)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 88 and step <= 90:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((40 + (step-88)*10 + pos_x, 30 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 91 and step <= 93:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((60 + pos_x, 40 + (step-91)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 94 and step <= 95:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((50 - (step-94)*10 + pos_x, 60 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 96 and step <= 97:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((40 + pos_x, 50 - (step-96)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                if step >= 98 and step <= 99:
                    grp.add(dwg.rect((50 + pos_x, 40 + (step-98)*10 + pos_y), (10, 10), fill=step_colour, stroke=step_colour, stroke_width=cell_width))
                    
                step += 1
                 
                # The outer spiral is complete.
                # Now switch to drawing a snake.
                # A lot of different paths are possible.
                
           majority = riding.votePercents[riding.totalVotes.idxmax()]
                
           snake_params = {50 : (20, 80, [7,7,7,7,7,7,7,1], 0),
                           51 : (20, 80, [7,7,7,7,7,7,7], 0),
                           52 : (20, 80, [7,7,7,7,7,7,6], 0),
                           53 : (90, 80, [7,7,7,7,7,6,6], 1),
                           54 : (20, 80, [7,7,7,7,6,6,6], 0),
                           55 : (90, 80, [7,7,7,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           56 : (20, 80, [7,7,6,6,6,6,6], 0),
                           57 : (90, 80, [7,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           58 : (20, 80, [6,6,6,6,6,6,6], 0),
                           59 : (70, 80, [5,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           60 : (60, 80, [4,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           61 : (50, 80, [3,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           62 : (40, 80, [2,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           63 : (30, 80, [1,6,6,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           64 : (20, 70, [6,6,6,6,6,6], 0),
                           65 : (30, 70, [5,6,6,6,6,6], 0),
                           66 : (80, 70, [5,5,6,6,6,6], 1),
                           67 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,6,6,6], 0),
                           68 : (80, 70, [5,5,5,5,6,6], 1),
                           69 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,6], 0),
                           70 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,5], 0),
                           71 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,4], 0),
                           72 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,3], 0),
                           73 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,2], 0),
                           74 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5,1], 0),
                           75 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,5], 0),
                           76 : (30, 70, [5,5,5,5,4], 0),
                           77 : (80, 70, [5,5,5,4,4], 1),
                           78 : (30, 70, [5,5,4,4,4], 0),
                           79 : (80, 70, [5,4,4,4,4], 1),
                           80 : (30, 70, [4,4,4,4,4], 0),
                           81 : (60, 70, [3,4,4,4,4], 1),
                           82 : (50, 70, [2,4,4,4,4], 1),
                           83 : (40, 70, [1,4,4,4,4], 1),
                           84 : (30, 60, [4,4,4,4], 0),
                           85 : (40, 60, [3,4,4,4], 0),
                           # No federal riding in Canada has a greater majority than 85.
                           # Proceed with caution, these are untested.
                           86 : (70, 60, [3,3,4,4], 1),
                           87 : (40, 60, [3,3,3,4], 0),
                           88 : (40, 60, [3,3,3,3], 0),
                           89 : (40, 60, [3,3,3,2], 0),
                           90 : (40, 60, [3,3,3,1], 0),
                           91 : (40, 60, [3,3,3], 0),
                           92 : (40, 60, [3,3,2], 0),
                           93 : (60, 60, [3,2,2], 1),
                           94 : (40, 60, [2,2,2], 0),
                           95 : (50, 60, [1,2,2], 1),
                           96 : (40, 50, [2,2], 0),
                           97 : (50, 50, [1,2], 0),
                           98 : (50, 50, [1,1], 0),
                           99 : (40, 50, [1], 0),
                           100: (0, 0, [0], 0)}
                
           init_x, init_y, snake_rows, snake_orientation = snake_params[majority]
           Snake((init_x + pos_x, init_y + pos_y), snake_rows, colour, snake_orientation, grp, dwg, cell_width)
                   
       else:
            
            # If no party has a majority, we just need to draw a simple snake pattern
            
            Snake((pos_x,90 + pos_y), [10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10], colour, 0, grp, dwg, cell_width)
            
       # Add an outline to the grid cell, if you want
            
       grp.add(dwg.rect((0 + pos_x,0 + pos_y),(100,100),fill='none',stroke='black',stroke_width=2)) 
                
       dwg.add(grp) 
        
       # Add the riding label
    
       dwg.add(dwg.text(riding.name,insert=(50 + pos_x,50 + pos_y),
                        fill='black',
                        text_anchor='middle',
                        font_size='12pt',
                        font_family="IBM Plex Sans Condensed Medium"))

Finally, our loop is done and we are ready to update the .svg canvas!!!

    # Now save it all...
    
    dwg.save()

And the last thing we need to run this script is that dictionary of party colours - here are the exact hex codes that I like to use.

# Define party colours

brand_colours = {'Liberal Party of Canada':  '#c94141', # Red
                'New Democratic Party' : '#e69f4a', # Orange
                'Libertarian Party of Canada': '#ebc53f', # Yellow  
                'Green Party of Canada': '#85ab53', # Green
                'Reform Party of Canada' : '#5f7b3b', # Dark green
                'Bloc Québécois': '#88c9c3', # Teal
                'Conservative Party of Canada': '#598dab', # Blue 
                "People's Party of Canada": '#af7ac8', # Purple
                'Workers Party of Britain': '#8b4943', # Maroon
                'Other': '#bfbfbf'} # Gray; unspecified colours automatically go here

# Run election_cartogram

election_cartogram(brand_colours, 'Data//saskatchewan_2024.csv', 'Riding', 'Saskatchewan 2024 ridings.svg')

Let's open up Inkscape immediately!! What does the final output look like?

Some assembly required

As previously mentioned, I don't like to use automatic shortcuts when it comes to the manual labour of assembling these grid squares into the desired final form. I'm also a control freak when it comes to typography, so I'm going to be adding every line break and abbreviation myself. The good news is that these blocks are already arranged into .svg groups that match the dimensions of Inkscape's default grid, so dragging them around the canvas is as quick and easy as it could possibly be.

Let's just briefly skip over all that skilled graphic design work that makes me difficult to replace with a chatbot. Hey, I'm not going to give away ALL of my secrets.

Bingo! You now know probably a full 80% of what goes into my election cartogram process.

Although I keep incautiously calling it "my election cartogram process", these types of visualizations can really be used for all kinds of datasets (hence this map style originally being developed for a demographic census project). Whether you're dealing with electoral geography, municipalities, states, or countries, I challenge you to go find something interesting to drop into this script!

To the City of Edmonton Archives!

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Where we last left off, I was walking old neighbourhoods to document historical house number plates in Edmonton. This empirical survey, besides wearing out my legs, had resulted in fifty geo-located photos of original house number plates in situ. Furthermore, going through the tax records for each address suggested a date range between 1914 and the mid-1950s. Not bad for information gleaned solely by walking around!

Enter the City of Edmonton Archives, which hold a large volume of material relating to the inner workings of the city government. How will original period documents relate to the data I've gathered from the streetscape?

Unsealing the vaults

Archivists are wonderful but their discipline is not magic. Before I phoned, I put together a simple little priority list of documents that I hoped could totally reshape what I know about Edmonton house number plates. At the very least, even if nothing else turned up, I was confident that I'd be able to pull a couple Number 3 items.

Priority list

Original specifications prescribing the form of the typical foil-and-glass Edmonton house number plate.
Anything related to number plate procurement, most likely involving some local sign shop.
Original bylaws and city council minutes relating to addressing and house numbering.

When I visited for the first time in early January, I was not surprised to find out that the only documents which the archivists had been able to turn up on my behalf were bylaws and council minutes.

Bingo - we have a hit on February 29th, 1928! (Check it out yourself at 1928 City Council Minutes, Meeting No. 10.)

The minutes read...

Numbering of Houses.

Recommending that a bylaw be passed requiring owners or occupiers of houses to have the proper number affixed to the front of the house where it can readily be seen from the sidewalk.

MOVED Ald. Farmilo,

That the recommendation be concurred in and the City Solicitor instructed to prepare the necessary bylaw. AGREED

We're off to a good start: the language here strongly implies that this is the first house numbering bylaw in Edmonton's history. This bumps our earliest start date fourteen years into the future from 1914, the year that Edmonton and Strathcona rolled out a uniform addressing system.

Here's what happened on April 25th, 1928, when the full bylaw text was presented to council. (Check it out yourself at 1928 City Council Minutes, Meeting No. 19.)

Bylaws Committee No. 8.

House Numbering C.R. 10-12

Recommending approval of bylaw as drafted. AGREED

Later that night, the final text was approved unanimously.

So what did the City Solicitor cook up?

Bylaw No. 19, 1928

Among other things:

A Bylaw respecting the numbering of houses.

The Municipal Council of the City of Edmonton, duly assembled, enacts as follows:

The houses and lots along the highways of the City of Edmonton shall be numbered and the numbers affixed to the houses, buildings, and other erections along said highways shall be in accordance with the provisions of the plan or scheme adopted by the Council of the City of Edmonton on the 19th day of August, 1913.

Off to a good start. We take this requirement for granted today, but if we're really lucky, its relative novelty in 1928 will mean that the bylaw text is more descriptive than its distant successors.

The Building Inspector shall by himself or his employees superintend and direct the numbering and assign the number to be given to each lot or building.

We have a specific department involved with the day-to-day administration of house numbering! This will come in handy for subsequent visits to the Archives.

The person so designated by the Building Inspector shall affix or inscribe the proper number as directed by him in plain and regular figures at least two inches in length in a conspicuous place not higher than the first storey on the front of every house, building or other erection which is not now numbered or is wrongly numbered or which may hereafter be erected within the City.

This is not a very detailed spec, but "at least two inches in length" is better than nothing. In practice, from walking the streets, we know that "a conspicuous place" often meant "immediately above the door".

The expense incidental to the numbering of each house or lot shall not, including the cost of affixing the number, exceed the sum of fifty cents, and the occupant, or in case of his default, the owner of every such house or lot shall be charged with such expense and shall pay the same to the Building Inspector or his employee, in advance before the affixing of the numbers.

Here's what interests me the most about the 1928 bylaw: a price being limited to fifty cents! In order to avoid the usual grumbling that accompanies any novel regulatory change on the planet, I suspect that the City was selling these below cost in order to encourage compliance. It's very difficult to imagine how the City could enforce this provision unless it was directly involved in the manufacture of house number signs.

It's not the perfect smoking gun that I imagined, but I think this is fairly clear proof that these signs are not just widespread because they were being sold by the only hardware store in town. Some public dollars went towards manufacturing and distributing them at an appealingly low rate.

Further paragraphs explain that barns, sheds, churches, places of public worship, public schools, public buildings, and vacant lots are all exempt from needing to display numbers. (Interestingly, you can see one installed on St. Anthony's Catholic Church on Whyte Avenue anyway.)

Nothing in this bylaw contained shall prevent any owner or occupier of any house, building or other erection required by this bylaw to be numbered, from numbering the same with such figures as the owner shall see fit, provided that such figures are not of less size than the figures prescribed by this bylaw and represent the proper number of such house, building or other erection.

Some very useful proof that standardized numbers were never REQUIRED and you could always go buy them from the hardware store yourself. This calls for a slight rethink of a metric that I was previously calling "survival rate", because it's proof that these glass-and-foil numbers were never installed on EVERY building.

In case you were politely holding yourself back from keeping count, the entire bylaw uses all derivatives of the word "erection" six times.

Edmonton residents may be disappointed to learn that vintage house numbers are NOT available for fifty cents today: this bylaw has long been repealed. So what came after it?

Bylaw No. 1718 (1955)

Dwight Eisenhower is on the throne, and Elizabeth II has just been crowned President. Welcome to the futuristic world of August 22nd, 1955.

Among other things, this updated bylaw shifts jurisdiction over house numbering from the Building Inspector to the Town Planner, probably related to the massive post-war suburbanization and expansion of the civil service we see in all Canadian cities. In pre-war Edmonton neighbourhoods, it's extremely rare to find entire blocks that were all built around the same year. Forget about central planning!

There are two really important words in here:

Every person upon obtaining a Building Permit from the City Architect and Inspector of Buildings shall be issued with metal numbers that may be affixed to the structure.

Metal NUMBERS, plural. I would not use this language to describe a manufactured glass and foil plate. It sounds to me like the City probably switched over to the interchangeable 0-9 hardware store digits that we know today. Makes sense: by the 1950s, foiled glass was long out of style, and it's entirely possible that a single high-volume City of Edmonton contract was keeping some elderly sign shop employee from retiring.

Bonus: no more language about fifty cents! It sounds like those lucky 1950s homeowners were getting their metal numbers for free.

So do these two bylaws bookend the glass-and-foil number plate era in Edmonton? Even if you don't believe my argument that the phrase "metal numbers" excludes the old glass plates that we see around town, my empirical tax year data (as of this writing) strongly supports SOME kind of cutoff in the middle of the 1950s:

Decade	Observations
1900s	3
1910s	13
1920s	9
1930s	14
1940s	53
1950-1955	10
1956	1
1960-date	4

In lieu of anything else turning up in the archives, I think a bylaw change (which, importantly, transferred house numbering authority between two city offices) is the most likely explanation for this sudden drop-off.

Henderson's Directories

I was really excited that these two bylaws seemed to provide unique, new information that constrained my date range to 1928-1955, but if you flip back to my priority list, I was a little disappointed that I failed to uncover any actual contract, invoice, or receipt proving that the City of Edmonton ordered these from a local manufacturer.

There was one more lead accessible in the Archives' reading room: a nearly complete set of Henderson's Directories, a private Internet precedessor which attempted to get every business in town to pay a small annual fee for inclusion. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I decided to record a complete inventory of every sign shop active in Henderson's from 1908 (the earliest year available) to 1955.

This led to a record of the names and addresses of about 70 unique businesses. Most were flashes in the pan, usually a sole proprietor listed by his personal name for a couple years worth of history. Only a few had any kind of lasting presence, and only two operated through our entire period of interest, 1928-1955.

Company	Years active
Hook Signs Ltd.	1912 - 1955
Kitchener Sign Co.	1912 - 1927
Henderson Signs Ltd.	1914 - 1939
Law Bros.	1920 - 1942
Commercial Signs Ltd.	1921 - 1955
Capital City Signs	1924 - 1953

This is already promising. Rather than looking for all possible City of Edmonton dealings with any sign shop, we can just look for all possible City of Edmonton dealings with Hook and Commercial... and keep our eye out for any appearance of the other, smaller companies, too (no reason why some of the plates couldn't have been done by a random low bidder in some years). The Archives have done a pretty good job of uploading machine-searchable finding aids to their website, so having specific business names makes searching from home much easier.

Even better - against all odds, Hook DONATED ALL THEIR STUFF TO THE CITY ARCHIVES when they got bought out in 1981!!! It's never going to happen again in my entire life that the weird defunct company I'm researching just so happens to have done this, so I'll enjoy it now.

You can check out the Hook Signs Ltd. fonds here, perhaps most notable for containing 2,000 photographs of random mid-20th-century Edmonton streetscapes. The OK Construction building seems to have a tiny original house number plate in its usual location right above the door:

I looked through about half of these photos and didn't find anything incredibly relevant to my query. If Hook was getting the City house number contract, their cameraperson didn't particularly care about documenting it, instead concentrating on the distinctive billboard installations that the company probably spent much more of its time and money on.

I also enjoyed how many unidentified street intersections were photographed in their raw natural form, before any billboards were ever installed. Market research!

That's all for today

We've uncovered a lot more information about old number plates in Edmonton, but this was just one visit to the Archives: pulling all those nice searchable company names, in particular, has given me more tools that I can use to attempt to track down those pesky sign-making documents that I think must have existed at one time.

On my next Archive visit, I'll be asking to see both archived copies of a 1930s municipal building code, issued by the same Building Inspector who was responsible for house number compliance at the time. If there is any surviving technical specification explaining how these number plates should be manufactured, I suspect it may exist in here.
Having access to all recorded City of Edmonton contracts AND a selection of Hook Signs Ltd. records will allow me to go to sleep easy thinking that I did my best to hunt down some kind of commercial transaction record.

Until then - it's a start, and there are always more streets to walk!!

Edmonton: South of the River

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

At this point, I'm just thinking of starting a second blog called "House Number Hunter". This year, my holiday schedule took me to Edmonton, and my insatiable curiosity took me around a large swath of the city's historical Strathcona neighbourhood. Guess what: there will be photos and maps of an excessive number of original house number plates later in this post. Read on!

A little hypothesis

I have already written at great length about historical house number plates in Regina, where spending time in an older neighbourhood quickly revealed that the city only has one widespread old house number style, suggesting some kind of common origin. Is this the case in other cities? Well, I'm a cheap and restless person, and walking is free.

After about twenty minutes spent perambulating around the famous* Whyte Avenue, I noticed a worn-out old house number that caught my attention.

* By Edmonton standards.

After an hour on my feet, I had located four, all sharing some key characteristics:

Nearly identical dimensions (small by modern standards)
Usually displayed right above the door (an unpopular location today)
Iron baseplate, foil, and glass construction
A scalloped outer edge fixes the glass to the baseplate
The foil layer is degraded with age

That's a pattern!

As much as I want to use my data science background to uncover lost secrets from Edmonton's past, let's briefly consider the null hypothesis: what if there's nothing really special about these house number plates, and they were just bought from a local hardware store? Importantly, I didn't spot any old numbers in other styles. I think it's safe to assume that these were once centrally issued for the Strathcona area.

This small sample raises a few unanswered questions. Although these plates all clearly share some kind of relationship, one of them has wildly different typography than the others, and its black coating seems to be disintegrating in an entirely different way. The tax records also indicate that every one of these buildings were put up in the 1940s, a full decade after standardized house numbers stopped being issued in Regina.

Before we revisit these points, let's go over a bit of local history.

The twin cities

Unlike Regina, a pancake-flat railway town which grew from an original nucleus with very little interruption, the addressing system in Edmonton was shaped by its turn-of-the-century politics. When Alberta entered the Canadian family in 1905, the deep valley of the North Saskatchewan River wound its way between the rival towns of Edmonton and Strathcona.

Long story short, Edmonton is the older one, growing up around a fur trading post - now currently occupied by the Alberta Legislature in the same fashion that some churches are built on top of Mesoamerican pyramids. Strathcona is an upstart railway boomtown, appearing south of the river a century later as the first tracks punched straight north from Calgary. Missing the train would normally seal the fate of any old prairie community, but Edmonton's nascent political establishment was able to rewrite history, and through treachery and intrigue the Legislative Building was awarded to the town north of the river.

In 1912, Strathcona was folded into Edmonton, and the result was a mess. The two cities had never co-ordinated their street names, and plenty of words were duplicated in different places. By 1914, the issue had gone to plebiscite, including a public contest with a cash prize of $100.

Ultimately, the public contest winner was ignored, and the winner of the plebiscite was Mayor Wm. Short's distinctive (and now familiar) plan to designate the heart of downtown as 101st Avenue and 101st Street. This is a pretty unusual strategy by North American standards, but because it sensibly avoids reduplicating addresses in the core, it was exported to most of Central Alberta. Thus was established the only place on earth where even the smallest towns generally begin at the intersection of 50th and 50th.

Assigning an arbitrarily high number to downtown makes sense, but if the goal is to avoid establishing a zero point in an inconvenient location, isn't this approach just kicking the can down the road for a few decades? Correct! Edmonton reached 0th and 0th in the 1980s, and was therefore forced to implement a quadrant system anyway, placing the entire existing city in the northwest. Most city residents only noticed this fact in the 2010s, when the first SOUTHWEST developments started coming onto the market.

In addition to being an interesting story of politics, public policy, and human folly, this little narrative gives us a very clear start date for old house numbers in the Strathcona area: five-digit plates cannot be from any earlier than 1914.

Heritage inventory

With the early results looking promising, I was ready to allocate a few mornings for walking around the Old Strathcona area at the turn of the New Year. A lot of low-rise apartments were put up around Whyte Ave in the 70s and 80s, so I braced myself for slim pickings in the heritage architecture department. Regardless, it only took four brisk outings to end up locating an even fifty plates!

I count 6,935 addresses in the area that I walked, so we are looking at a survival rate around 0.7% - indeed much worse than the 1.6% that I encountered in Cathedral (Regina's nice inner-city neighbourhood). But, statistics are statistics, and more observations are inevitable if you just keep walking. Or at least these are the kinds of platitudes I muttered to myself as I enjoyed Edmonton's typical -20° January weather.

Even before I was done walking, I noticed that there were a few different categories of old number plate in circulation. These four styles are quite different from the mainstream, and are therefore the easiest to identify:

Let's download the City of Edmonton's property assessment information and compare these categories to the recorded build year of each house.

Category	Years built
Curved Sides	1926, 1933, 1933, 1934, 1934
Deluxe	1900, 1912, 1915, 1932, 1933, 1946, 1946, 1947, 1950
Modified	Irrelevant - no likely common origin
Serif	1941, 1942, 1942, 1942, 1943, 1943, 1945, 1945

Two hits and a miss!! These are all small sample sizes, but the Curved Sides category seems tightly constrained to the Depression years, and the Serif category (the most distinctive of the bunch) seems very tightly constrained to World War II. Perhaps its different method of manufacture and noticeably lower quality are the result of wartime shortages? Only the aesthetically pleasing Deluxe category is completely unmoored in time, spanning pretty much our entire date range from 1900 to 1950.

This leaves a large slush pile of 23 very plain and similar house number plates, spanning a wide range of dates from 1924 to 1954. I have some thoughts about how to differentiate these as well, but the variations are much more subtle and I think this would be best left for later.

Next steps

In a few afternoons, I think we've conclusively proven that older houses in Strathcona do have a common original house number plate style!

Even worse, it's completely different from the original plate style seen and documented in Regina, which implies that we might turn up completely unexpected results with a bit of research in any larger Western Canadian city. Is this hobby going to ruin my life?

Date range: These plates cannot be any older than 1914, and they seem to have been issued into the early 1950s. When I'm back at my home computer, I need to do a bit of data work about building age frequency in the older parts of Edmonton. It's possible that the later plates were simply physically carried over from older properties, but I didn't spot as many obvious infills as I saw in Regina, and the Serif category is clear proof that these were being issued new into the 1940s.

Geographic range: Anywhere in Edmonton that was built before the mid-50s is likely to contain a decent population of old number plates. I used Google Streetview to confirm that some target buildings exist north of the river... which is where Edmonton's biggest downscale older neighbourhoods happen to be. Guess where I'm going next?

Survival rate: Either Old Strathcona has been more intensely redeveloped than Cathedral, or glass and foil are simply physically fragile materials that don't last as well. I suspect it's a bit of both.

Categories: I think my currently demarcated category scheme is pretty robust, but I want to keep an eye out for subtle differences in the typical sans-serif type that I haven't even attempted to analyze in this post.

Oddballs: What on earth is going on with the two plates that list the full address of their house, number and street name?? This seriously punctures the argument that these were centrally handed out by the city government.

Before I head home, my plan is to do some walking in the northern Highlands area, which has seen much less infill development than trendy Old Strathcona. I'll also be getting in touch with the City of Edmonton Archives, a useful amenity not available in Regina, to see if they can turn up any original documentation to support the trends I see on the street. Maybe I'll even find out how these plates were manufactured, and come up with some ideas for how I could reproduce them.

All of this will have to wait for a second Edmonton historic house number post. If you know anything about these things, or want to invite me over to your historical neighbourhood in a different Canadian city, please get in touch!

Regina House Numbers: Repatriated!!

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I've been hanging around Edmonton over Christmas, and wouldn't you guess what kind of familiar blue enamel rectangle I stumbled across at the Rocky Mountain Antique Mall!!

As a quick refresher, this is a standard City of Regina house number plate issued before the Great Depression, a subject which you can read about at great length here and here.

Not so fast

Or IS it? While I have exhaustively documented historical number plates inside the historic core of Regina, and this object is a perfect match, I have not conclusively proven that this style was never used in other cities in Western Canada.

However, I do have proof that blue enamel plates are not found in the City of Edmonton (surprise: there's going to be another blog post coming about this). So it must have been imported from somewhere, and Regina is the most plausible source. For the rest of this post, we're just going to assume I'm right, but I'll feel really silly if I discover six months later that these plates were also used in Medicine Hat or Saskatoon.

Pricing and identification

Apparently enamel signs - a specialty of the Rocky Mountain Antique Mall, which is just a couple blocks downwind of the more popular Old Strathcona Antique Mall - are really expensive. I was shocked to see pretty much every recognizable original enamel advertisement in the mall marked up to at least $500, regardless of condition.

I picked this thing up for $34. That's still a little steep by my standards, but I admit that as THE person obsessed with this very specific subject, the game was rigged from the start. I am almost certain that the owner did NOT recognize it as a Regina house number plate and simply appraised it as a random enamel object. Please don't ask me how much I would have been willing to pay for it, I read a lot of Wikipedia articles about game theory and I'm not telling.

As the foremost expert in the field, I would call its quality very average. A bit of rust damage emanating out from the nail holes is almost universal on these items, and it hasn't suffered too much from any sloppy paint jobs over the years.

Here are a couple other random street signs that were available for sale, indicating that this mall is a bit of a clearinghouse for unidentified enamel signs with no recorded provenance.

For the record, I researched these two particular signs a little bit, and the only McEvoy Street in Canada seems to be in Fredericton... and not particularly near downtown, either. I suspect they might actually be Australian, as there ARE both a McEvoy Street and a South Avenue in the older part of Sydney. If we can even assume that these form a set. Not my problem! (But for $190, it could be your problem.)

In hand at last

Have I been very eager to just pick one of these things up and flip it over a few times to watch the light play off its surfaces? Yes, I really have. I used a bit of rubbing alcohol to remove the price tag.

Although this is an immensely satisfying find, I can't say that it's taught me very much new information about these plates. Their biggest structural weakness seem to be the nail holes, which punch straight through the protective enamel layer, leaving an unshielded iron surface for rust to develop on. Otherwise, the enamel has weathered very handsomely for being (most likely) more than a century old.

Where did it come from?

Unlike all my other number plate observations, this one is not in situ. But, uh, to state the obvious, it says "1855" on it, and that counts for a lot. The Regina address shapefile can be downloaded here, which makes it very easy to pull every 1855 address in our target area. There are only thirteen possibilities!

We're kind of grasping at straws here, but what the heck, let's do a quick investigation into what sits at all of these locations today:

Street	Year built	Description
Connaught Street	1914	Detached house
York Street	1947	Detached house
Cameron Street	1957	PLS Sign & Graphic storefront
Rae Street	1975	Low-rise apartment
Lorne Street	1973	Office building
Scarth Street	1912	Shree Akshar Vegetarian Restaurant
Rose Street	N/A	Surface parking lot
Halifax Street	N/A	Vacant lot
Ottawa Street	1911	Detached house
Montreal Street	N/A	Vacant lot
Quebec Street	1912	Detached house
Winnipeg Street	2015	Detached house
Victoria Avenue	1976	Victoria Tower

There's no way to actually confirm where this plate came from, but there are three houses still standing (c. 2025) that are reasonable candidates!! I think this is super cool.

If you are one of these owners, and are interested in buying this original plate back: um, yes, I think a 1,000% markup would be very reasonable for all the effort put into this research project, please contact me asap...

The Average Canadian Life

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In 2021, I was really interested in centres of population, and I decided to calculate them for everything I could imagine. It turns out the results are pretty entertaining for almost any section of a national census. Are Fijians a more westerly ethnicity than Acadians? (Yes, they are!) Is there a mean centre of income? (Yes, it's a little west of the mean centre of population.)

It's easy to calculate the dots, but when can we connect them? Out of all the census variables, there is one that forms a natural time series: human age. Thus was created The Average Canadian Life, one of my better-remembered random social media posts over the years. You may well have personally contributed to this squiggle:

In general, there are more babies in Alberta, more young professionals in Toronto, and more senior citizens in the Maritimes, so there is some hard logic to this wandering path. But even if it makes intuitive sense, can we be sure that this really means anything? Let's get into the top-level assumptions and the technical workflow that went into making this project.

In the middle of something

I hate to drop this kind of truth bomb but "centre of population" is a mathematically imprecise term. There is no such thing. Look, I'm not a math major either. (Wikipedia)

I recommend reading this very short and Canada-specific paper¹, which explains everything concisely, provides useful instructions for creating your own algorithm at home, and includes the unbeatable sentence "The population counts were extracted from the 1976, 1981, and 1986 Geography Tape Files".

The median centre is the point that divides the set of points into two sets of equal halves, usually north-south and east-west. Tantalizingly, this is very computationally simple and can be calculated by anybody with a working knowledge of Microsoft Excel, so it appears in a lot of economics papers where it shouldn't. One big problem with this method is that the direction of north matters and you will get a different result if you rotate your dividing lines.
The mean centre is the balancing point, the centre of gravity. This is also computationally simple (the U.S. Census Bureau has calculated it for long enough that it is part of the original myth of western expansion), but it's difficult to do with QGIS alone and some basic ability in Python helps.
The geometric median centre is the point of minimum aggregate travel. Think of it as the ideal place to build a really big hotel. Mathematicians have proved that there is no truly simple way to calculate this one, but any modern computer won't think twice about iterating through hundreds of guesses.

Wait, the mean centre is different from the point of minimum aggregate travel? Yes! The centre of gravity is going to be disproportionately thrown off by the locations of the most distant people. Here's a visual demonstration I embellished from Wikimedia Commons:

You should definitely just go and read that five-page paper I linked, but in case the link died or something, it makes the following assessment:

Unfortunately, there is no ideal measure of the center of a population. The median center is insensitive to the distances of points from the center; the mean center puts undue weight on the distant points; and the point of minimum aggregate travel is insensitive to radial movements of the individual points. Of these shortcomings, the insensitivity to radial movement is the least severe, and the point of minimum aggregate travel is recommended as the best measure of the center of a population.

A bit of programming

Just ignore this section if you don't want to try doing any of this at home. This is a simple enough problem that anyone who made it through high school math should be able to tackle it. Let's assume that you're using the ubiquitous Python "pandas" library, and that you have a big spreadsheet of census information in the following format:

Dissemination area	Latitude	Longitude	Census variable
10010165	47.527088	-52.776718	500
10010166	47.527346	-52.775186	340
10010167	47.529744	-52.772671	410

Calculating the mean centre is simple, so let's start with that. The only little hiccup here is that we're using spherical coordinates, and we need to remember that the actual length of 1 degree of longitude changes depending where on the ball we are.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

census_information = pd.read_csv(your_filename_here).set_index('Dissemination area')

def mean_centre(census_information, census_variable):
    
    df = census_information.loc[:, ('latitude','longitude', census_variable)]

    total = df[census_variable].sum()
    
    df['lat_sum'] = df['latitude'] * df[census_variable]

    latitude = df['lat_sum'].sum() / df[census_variable].sum()

    df['lon_sum'] = df[census_variable] * df['longitude'] * np.cos(np.pi*df['latitude']/180)

    df['lon_den'] = df[census_variable] * np.cos(np.pi*df['latitude']/180)

    longitude = df['lon_sum'].sum() / df['lon_den'].sum()
    
    output = pd.DataFrame([census_variable, latitude, longitude, total],
                    index=['Census Variable','Latitude','Longitude','Total population']).transpose()
    
    return output

I pride myself on being a desktop GIS user more than I am a programmer, but I have to admit that this is a really short and useful script that makes choosing a map projection irrelevant and replaces a lot of messing around with opaque plugins in QGIS.

Now we're ready to take on the harder task of calculating the geometric median. Let's go back to that paper, which helpfully describes a simple algorithmic approach to this problem:

The Weiszfeld procedure begins with the selection of an arbitrary point as the initial seed location. The distances and directions from that seed to all other (possibly weighted) points are determined, and the trial point is displaced in the indicated direction. The procedure is then repeated until it stabilizes on a value, or some displacement threshold is reached.

You can pick apart my implementation if you like, but otherwise just trust me that it runs:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

census_information = pd.read_csv(your_filename_here).set_index('Dissemination area')

def travel_centre(census_information, census_variable, threshold):
        
    df = census_information.loc[:, ('latitude','longitude', census_variable)]
    
    total = df[census_variable].sum()

    # Convert spherical coordinates
    
    df['x'] = np.cos(np.pi*df['latitude']/180) * np.cos(np.pi*df['longitude']/180)
    df['y'] = np.sin(np.pi*df['latitude']/180)

    # Location of our initial guess. This is a random location in Lake Huron
    
    xh = -80
    yh = 45
    
    delta = 100

    # Repeat until very little progress is being made
    # I use 0.00001 as my default threshold value
    
    while delta > threshold:
        
        oxh = xh
        oyh = yh
        
        df['xn'] = ( df['x'] / ( (xh - df['x']) ** 2 + (yh - df['y']) ** 2 ) ** 0.5 ) * df[census_variable]
        df['yn'] = ( df['y'] / ( (xh - df['x']) ** 2 + (yh - df['y']) ** 2 ) ** 0.5 ) * df[census_variable]
        
        df['d'] = df[census_variable] / ( (xh - df['x']) ** 2 + (yh - df['y']) ** 2 ) ** 0.5
        
        xn = df['xn'].sum()
        yn = df['yn'].sum()
        
        d = df['d'].sum()
        
        xh = xn / d
        yh = yn / d
        
        delta = ( (oxh - xh) ** 2 + (oyh - yh) ** 2 ) ** 0.5
        
    # Now spit out the final results
                
    latitude = np.arcsin(yh) * 180 / np.pi
    longitude = - np.arccos(xh / np.cos(latitude * np.pi / 180)) * 180 / np.pi
    
    output = pd.DataFrame([census_variable, latitude, longitude, total],
                    index=['Census Variable','Latitude','Longitude','Population']).transpose()
    
    return output

Note: the Earth is not quite round, and if we were really anal we might want all of these distance calculations to account for the ellipsoid. This can be easily done with the GeoPandas Python library. I'm not going to bother here.

Wait, that's new. Why am I not being really anal? I just want to protect you, my beloved audience, from the horrific, sloppy reality of coding for real-world science. In practice, if you (sensibly) understand programming as a means to an end, then Python is all about downloading random libraries to solve complex tasks in single lines of code. What if it doesn't work right? That's the library maintainer's fault, and if you're not a software engineer you'll probably never get to the bottom of it. It is famously said that Python is always the second-best programming language to solve any task.

Being able to implement simple low-level procedures from old papers is a base skill that lets you solve more problems than any amount of proficiency in specialized high-level desktop software. For the time being, I think it's more fun, or at least more educational, to keep the math simple enough that it can all just be done right here in the script.

The wandering path

As soon as I first calculated The Average Canadian Life, I was struck by the seemingly intuitive explanations for every major bend in the line, but I wondered if it was really meaningful. It wouldn't be the first time that my brain had tried to interpret random nonsense.

Luckily, age is one of the most granular parts of the census, and each year gets reported individually. This means we can break open those 5-year population buckets to calculate a messier and more detailed version:

Success! As usual with dis-aggregated data, the result is more scattered. But we can see proof that all the years really do form an approximate sequence, with the same approximate form as the first map. This also tips us off that the data becomes nonsensical after 90 years, as the population numbers get very thin and the geometric median points start escaping in all kinds of wild directions.

If we pull out the original version of this map, which I made in October 2021, we can also see the the general shape of the Average Life squiggle has remained very consistent between 2016 and 2021. This is another good sign that we're looking at something real.

There is one more quick way of looking at this data. You might remember from the top of the page that the average 5-year-old in 2016 now lives in exactly the same spot as the average 10-year-old in 2021. So what if we just ignore the weird squiggle, and match every 2016 cohort to its 2021 equivalent, five years in the future?

Interesting again! It looks like some age groups are less mobile than others: kids barely move at all, but twenty-somethings head straight for the GTA. Then you become middle-aged and stop moving again, probably because you're busy raising all those children in Bradford West Gwillimbury.

On the far side of middle age, there's a little retirement age bump around 70-74, where you're out of the workforce but still living independently enough to stay at home. Beyond that narrow cohort, you're either actively retiring into the suburbs, or getting sent to a care facility back in the core.

Again, the data for the very elderly gets sparse and weird, so I've manually removed the final 100+ cohort as the result seems completely meaningless.

Return to centre

There are definitely more sophisticated ways to use census data to track human mobility against the human lifespan, but the unusual simplicity of The Average Canadian Life has reliably earned a lot of attention on social media. Just a testament to the weirdly compelling power of centres of population!

...even IF that's mathematically imprecise language, and there really is no such thing as a centre of population.

Kumler & Goodchild. (1989). The Population Center of Canada— Just North of Toronto?!?↩

Regina House Number Plates: Deep Dive

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As previously discussed, I am obsessed with the original blue house number plates in Regina. It's not the most popular hobby out there, but what would I do if I didn't have weird interests - watch TV? Play video games?? Relax???

Here's a map of the 104 known original house number locations that I've been able to personally collect, based on a lot of travel through the just-off-downtown Cathedral and Heritage neighbourhoods. From Streetview and other sources, I can confirm that original number plates also exist in North Central, and in fact it's very possible that North Central contains more than Cathedral and Heritage put together. (I also finally found one in the core... while researching this post.)

Let's dig a little deeper. We have:

Photographs
GPS coordinates
Addresses

We don't have:

Any relevant original sources

Things could be worse, but this is not ideal for a history project. Luckily, there's something else in our corner: the City of Regina Property Search.

Property Assessment Data

This spits out some public tax information about any property that we care to look up...

...including, crucially, the Effective Year Built.

The effective year of construction of a structure. This is used when major renovations have taken place and parts of the building now contain new material. (City of Regina Property Tax Glossary)

By the way, I can't stand when municipalities provide database information that needs to be manually looked up one entry at a time, so I wrote a simple Python web scraper to solve this problem forever.

import requests
import pandas as pd
from lxml import html

url = "https://atpublictaxweb.azurewebsites.net/SearchAccountByID?accountID="

headers = {"User-agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.80 Safari/537.36"}

numbers = range(10000000, 10400000)

try:
    properties = pd.read_csv('regina_properties.csv').dropna(how='all')
    properties = properties.set_index('Account Number')
    properties.index = properties.index.astype('int')
except:
    print("Regina property database doesn't exist, creating it now...")
    properties = pd.DataFrame()

for account in numbers:
    
    if account not in properties.index:
        
        print("Processing account number " + str(account))
    
        dest = url + str(account)
        
        page = requests.get(dest, headers=headers)
        tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
        
        summary = tree.cssselect('#property_summary table tr td')
        assessment = tree.cssselect('#property_assessment table tr td')
        taxes = tree.cssselect('#property_taxes table tr td')
        l = tree.cssselect('#property_characteristics_left ul li')
        r = tree.cssselect('#property_characteristics_right ul li')
        
        summary = [str(x.text_content()) for x in summary]
        summary = dict([summary[i * 2:(i + 1) * 2] for i in range((len(summary) + 2 - 1) // 2 )])
        
        for x in list(summary.keys()):
            summary[x.replace(":","")] = summary.pop(x)
        
        assessment = [str(x.text_content()) for x in assessment]
        assessment = [assessment[i * 3:(i + 1) * 3] for i in range((len(assessment) + 3 - 1) // 3 )]
        assessment = dict([[x[0], x[2]] for x in assessment])
        summary.update(assessment)
        
        taxes = [str(x.text_content()) for x in taxes]
        taxes = [taxes[i * 3:(i + 1) * 3] for i in range((len(taxes) + 3 - 1) // 3 )]
        taxes = dict([[x[0], x[2]] for x in taxes])
        summary.update(taxes)
        
        characteristics = l + r
        characteristics = [x[0].text_content().split(': ') for x in characteristics]
        characteristics = dict(characteristics)
        summary.update(characteristics)
        
        output = [summary]
        
        if summary:
            outputFrame = pd.DataFrame.from_records(output).set_index('Account Number')
        else:
            outputFrame = pd.DataFrame(index=[account])
        
        properties = pd.concat([properties, outputFrame])
            
        properties.to_csv('regina_properties.csv', index_label='Account Number')

Effective Year Built

With a dataset of 104 observations and access to all the building ages in the city, there is PLENTY that we can learn about the history of these number plates. Let's take a look at build year frequency in Regina's three main inner-city neighbourhoods:

Regina was founded in 1882, recorded a population of 2,249 in 1901, and was incorporated as a city in 1903. None of that matters to this dataset, which only records 11 existing properties as having been constructed before 1905, only 2 of which fall into our study area. Whatever happened in this era, it is very difficult to reconstruct from existing architecture.

But, what the heck, you're here anyway, so here's the full list of 11 properties. Take this with a grain of salt, the city tax roll was never intended to be a heritage inventory.

Building	Address		Effective year built
St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral	1861	McIntyre Street	1800 (hint: this is definitely a data error)
RCMP Depot	6101	Dewdney Avenue	1883
Al Ritchie area residence	2500	Edgar Street	1900
Northeast area residence	464	Toronto Street	1900
Centre Square area residence	2250	Scarth Street	1902
Centre Square area residence	2062	Cornwall Street	1903
Dawat India Restaurant	2167	Hamilton Street	1903
Centre Square area residence	2049	Lorne Street	1903
Cathedral area residence	2354	Garnet Street	1904
Reign Hair Studio	2334	Lorne Street	1904
Cathedral area residence	3628	Victoria Avenue	1904

Imperfect as it may be, let's map that tax roll information out. Maps are the fastest way to tell if a dataset is junk or not!

Remember, this data only concerns the current building on every lot, but it still tells us plenty.

In general, residential development in Regina expanded outwards from the core... and then the Great Depression brought the province grinding to a halt, creating a lost decade where nothing was built anywhere in the city. Regina wouldn't boom again until 1945, the advent of the modern suburb.

A useful rule of thumb for this area: if anything is built after 1930, it is modern and doesn't fit the original age of the neighbourhood. In particular, you can see intense redevelopment around the major commercial arteries that surround both areas.

Sample vs. Population

So how do those number plate observations match up with the overall population of old buildings?

Bingo! Even though 104 is not that large of a sample, the distribution clearly reflects the two-peaked pre-war boom and interwar boom that we see in the city tax records.

The newest building I've found with an original number plate was built in 1955. So the city probably stopped handing them out sometime in the 50s, right?

NOT SO FAST. These old plates are usually attached by two rusty nails, and there is nothing to guarantee that they haven't been moved or tampered with. As long as people can't resist messing around with their property, no single observation in this dataset should be regarded as fully credible. (Perhaps they even bought a convincing replica of a historical fixture because of an inexplicable personal obsession?)

Remember, a month of hunting only revealed 104 original number plates, in two neighbourhoods that contain 4,195 addresses between them. That's a miserable 2.5% survival rate:

Neighbourhood	Total addresses	Observations	Survival rate
Cathedral	2,557	41	1.6%
Heritage	1,638	63	3.8%

Given that complete drop-off in all construction during the Depression, I suspect that the plates stopped being manufactured around 1930. Why keep maintaining a standard address system for a bankrupt city that's not growing? The rest of the story might look something like this.

Remember, Cathedral and Heritage were almost completely built out before the Depression: only North Central retained enough vacant development land to record large numbers of new properties in the early 50s. During the post-war boom, a few new builds reused the original plates. Maybe this was done under the direction of a new generation of owners, with the grandparents still remembering being issued their shiny new plate on their first house, twenty to forty years earlier? Or was it the responsibility of the general contractor, who was trained under some bylaw to make sure that the standard blue plate remained visible from the street? Eventually, with an explosion of post-war consumer goods on the market, the existence of the government number plates would have been forgotten, and buying your own insignia from the hardware store would have become the norm as it is today.

Here's an example of a plate that was clearly saved because a later renovator recognized its heritage value:

It's a nice story, but without any other sources, it's just a story. Still, there's one additional piece of information hidden in these blue enamel plates.

Paleographic Analysis

Paleography (Wikipedia) - "one of the auxiliary sciences of history". Analyzing the shapes of letters and numbers, which tend to shift from generation to generation, is used to date Biblical manuscripts more accurately than radiocarbon.

In a modern industrial context, we already have our century pinpointed pretty accurately, but there's one secret that these plates have left to give up: they were painted by two distinctive hands.

Can you see it? The Regular hand is well-practiced, but is definitely not a set of machine stencils. The form of the 2's varies a lot, and the kerning is all over the place.

The Narrow hand is a little tidier, usually a little thinner, takes up less of the plate, and always leaves a distinctive point on the top of every 1.

I've also found four oddballs that defy any classification. Two seem to match each other, while the other two are completely unlike any other plate in the city. Despite the dissimilarity, their dimensions and weathering patterns suggest that they are of the same original vintage as the other plates, and I strongly doubt that they would have come from a different factory.

The Regular hand is dominant, but not overwhelmingly so. Here's the frequency table:

Type	Count
Regular	97
Narrow	19
Oddballs	4

What happens when we plug this typeface classification into our tax year data?

Bingo! There's a clear relationship!!

Here are my best guesses about how these signs were made. First of all, I think they were manufactured inside the city. Saskatoon is still home to an enamel sign manufacturer today, in an era when the technology is much less ubiquitous. I'll further assume that the consistent Regular hand was the work of a single employee, who would have had thousands of very rote address signs to produce over their long career. How much of the manufacturer's business would have been taken up by this single reliable public-sector contract, I cannot guess.

I am very confident in suggesting the following timeline for Regina house number plates:

The original Regina sign painter worked from the earliest days of the city to 1928.
The narrow hand took over from 1928 to 1930.
Standard number plates were abolished as the Depression took hold.
Later builds with old number plates are proof of the human tendency to become interested in the strangest things.
The oddballs are so physically similar to the other plates, but so few in number. They were the result of other employees occasionally filling in.

Modern Hope

Clearly, some other people in Regina are interested in their original number plates.

One lovely house in Cathedral boasts a replica from Sosenco, the Polish supplier that I used for my own replica! What a shame that this guy just went with the off-the-shelf typeface, rather than spending days wandering the neighbourhood in order to reconstruct the original government-issue typeface. Having a real job must be really hard.

Elsewhere in Cathedral, the plates are tucked safely behind glass, never to touch another raindrop...

...or displayed right alongside other symbols of local pride.

It's not surprising that Cathedral people would fussily look after their old properties, but even in the rougher Heritage area, plates in situ showed evidence of repair...

...restoration...

...and even re-invention.

When a person eases off a period of intense obsession, it's tempting to rationalize it all by speculating that the object of the fixation is actually really important. I doubt it! I guarantee most people who hang out in the middle of Regina have gone by these things hundreds of times without noticing, and installing eight thousand new blue enamel number plates would be very unlikely to bring back the short-lived prosperity of Saskatchewan in the 1920s.

To Regina's credit, everybody who caught me taking pictures of their front door was polite and, by the end of the conversation, most of them were even curious. If you happened to catch a suspicious man on your doorbell camera in October: whoops! (I don't even want to imagine what's going around on Facebook about this.)

I like standardized things; they are a reminder that we live on a planet where co-operation is mandatory. If you like getting things delivered to your house, you probably want to participate in a local authority that can implement a consistent addressing system. If the city hires one central sign painter, it creates a good, reliable job, and less waste than sending everybody to drive to a store at the edge of town to improvise one themselves. Clearly, these are some crazy, radical thoughts.

If I've learned one thing on this project, it's that I am never going to be able to walk through an old neighbourhood for the rest of my life without trying to reconstruct a little mental breakdown of what exactly Western Canadian hardware stores were selling in 1925.

Regina House Number Plates

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

At the start of 2024, I bought a rustic old house in Val Marie. Turns out fixing up an old house is difficult, and draws on many skilled disciplines! So, rather than take on the most important tasks first (insulating the roof, insulating the basement, etc.) I thought I would distract myself by looking for the perfect decorative house number style.

This little mistake kicked off what would eventually become a month-destroying obsession.

Welcome to Old Regina

I often end up in Regina's leafy Cathedral neighbourhood - maybe even too often. See, Regina boomed in the 1920s, when Saskatchewan was Canada's third-largest province. The resulting body of inner-city housing stock forms the matrix of Canada's cheapest arts neighbourhood. It seems like every culturally minded person in Saskatchewan, if they so choose, can afford a decent century house in Cathedral.

I almost groan when I run into fascinating Regina residents who are especially interested in my work: Hey, this has been a great conversation. You live just west of downtown, right? Yes, of course you do! No, no, it was just a lucky guess. (This is the land of the grey hair and the graduate degree, where loving maps is a near-inevitability.)

In April, I had a free afternoon in the city, and I thought Cathedral would be the perfect place to start my vintage house number hunt. After a few blocks, I started to notice a pattern.

The oldest houses in Cathedral are disproportionately marked with these rusty blue number plates.

These must be original to the earliest days of the city!!!

Blue enamel number plates

Here are the essential characteristics of an original Regina house number plate.

The plate is midnight blue, shifting from blue to near-black depending on the angle of the light.
The numerals are white and have a very subtle relief to them.
The colour contrast has held up perfectly over the years, but rust spots are common.
Each number was individually painted by an expert hand.

Wikipedia helpfully explains a little more about enamel signs: the technology was patented in 1859, mass-produced in 1886, and remained globally popular until World War II. You're looking at powdered glass that's been melted onto an iron base, which explains both the excellent durability and the usual rust damage. The perfect material for a turn-of-the-century boomtown!

I am not a skilled archival researcher, so I have not been able to find a single original source describing early Regina addressing, nor any information about an original supplier. But if there's one thing I CAN do, it's latch on to an idea for much longer than a healthy person would.

I became obsessed with creating an accurate reproduction plate for my own house, and that meant documenting as many original number plates as possible.

The inventory

This project got out of hand really fast.

In October, I had a particular contract that involved a daily bicycle commute from Lakeview to Heritage, crossing the full breadth of inner-city Regina. This gave me an excuse to pick a different set of cross-streets every day, hopping off my bike to briefly photograph any original fixture that I noticed. I cannot call this a systematic inventory, because there are still streets in both neighbourhoods that I haven't walked, but it's close.

By the way, if you are ever doing harmless weirdo behaviour in a public place, I recommend weekday mid-mornings and having a fast, confident walking gait.

As of this writing, I have personally identified and geolocated 41 original number plates in Cathedral and 63 original number plates in Heritage.

I thought that pleasant old Cathedral would be home to the highest density of original fixtures in the city, but it's still an arts neighbourhood, and higher property values mean more redevelopment. East of downtown, cheaper Heritage is speckled with old ethnic churches and boarded-up nuisance properties, and it's not surprising to see a much higher density of untouched old exteriors there. Note I have not yet been able to find a single one of these plates in the actual core of Regina, although Regina is not that intensely developed and plenty of single-family dwellings survive just off downtown.

I would expect even more original number plates in North Central, the city's third old neighbourhood, but this part of town is literally on the other side of the tracks and was not part of my daily routine in 2024. My suspicions here are immediately confirmed by the headline photo in this CBC piece about Regina nuisance properties.

Reproduction

104 individual photos are much more than sufficient to accurately reproduce all ten digits in the original sign painter's hand. It really only took 22 photos to get a clear shot of every available number, the rest was pure overkill. By the way, not every blue enamel sign in Regina has exactly the same numbering style - but we're getting deeply in the weeds here, and the large majority of original house numbers are very self-similar, possibly all created by a single unknown technician. The number "2" is especially common in Cathedral addresses, and is what first made me realize that these were all painted by hand and weren't just using a set of common stencils.

So I opened up my favourite free vector graphics editor, Inkscape, and got to work. Here's my first attempt at, um, digitizing the digits:

When you are planning to work with a factory, it really helps to have an exact scale, something I soon realized I had completely neglected. I ran back outside with a ruler and measured the first sign I saw at approximately 8" x 4.5".

With the design finalized, where was I going to get this thing manufactured? Browsing through random Etsy sellers, I discovered that a few traditional enamel sign manufacturers still exist, mostly in Europe where this style of address plate is more popular. I decided to go with Sosenco, based out of Poland.

Shipping was slow but the final result was great:

The midnight blue colour and slight physical relief were a perfect match for the original Regina plates, and the classy brass grommets are an improvement over the originals, hopefully mitigating the long-term rust damage caused by drilling unshielded holes into this material. (Also, I would feel bad about making a reproduction that is truly indistinguishable from the original article, so a bit of feature creep is OK by me.)

Installation

When burning dozens of hours on an insane passion project that nobody asked you to do, it helps to stay in touch with your original motivations. This reproduction number plate looks fantastic.

Since I've put a ridiculous amount of work into doing all the research necessary to create reproduction number plates for any address, and I know so many people in Cathedral anyway, I have been meaning to spin this into a new side business. If only I didn't already have an enormous slush pile of potentially lucrative ideas that relate to prairie history.

I also think I am probably now the world expert on original Regina house numbers, so in lieu of any other sources turning up, I have some data science thoughts about what this 104-photo inventory is able to tell us about the historical manufacture and distribution of these plates. Expect a subsequent post, with histograms.

If you are interested in getting your hands on one of these reproduction number plates, please get in touch, and if you have ideas about how these could be marketed to Regina heritage enthusiasts, please super duper get in touch!

Losing a Municipal Election

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, the votes are finally in, and I lost by 36 to 45.

It feels a little inappropriate to use percentage points to analyze a race where less than 100 votes were cast in total, but that's 44.4% to 55.6%, an 11-point loss. The closest analogue in provincial politics would be Bronwyn Eyre, the former MLA who just lost Saskatoon Stonebridge by a nearly identical margin, 43.4% to 54.3%. Now I have something polite to talk about if I ever meet her!

That's enough votes that I'm not embarrassed, and in the world of municipal politics I think it's not a bad performance against a 21-year incumbent. Here's my campaign story:

The Paperwork

If you've never done it before, running for office usually carries some kind of signature requirement.

To get on a federal ballot, you need 100 eligible voters... but you're encouraged to collect 150, because there is no post-submission appeal process if any of your signatures are found to be invalid. Just imagine collecting 150 signatures on behalf of the Liberal Party in Weyburn! This mighty task is the greatest preoccupation of dozens of paid organizational staff come election time, and only a few parties have the resources to send those staff into every single longshot riding in the country. I personally gathered about 60 nomination signatures in my 2021 campaign.

At the municipal level, this task is much less onerous. Please flip open your copy of the Local Government Election Act, 2015 to Part VII, Section 67(3):

Val Marie is DEFINITELY:

not a rural municipality (yes, really: RMs are their own distinct category, it's a Saskatchewan thing)
a place with less than 20,000 people (19,880 less, in fact)
not divided into wards (entertaining as this would be)

That means five signatures - an easy hour's work. With 4% of the electorate contacted already, I was feeling good.

The Long Month of October

In Canada, federal and provincial elections can be called by the executive branch at any time - and must happen automatically if a major deadlock emerges (if you ever wondered why we never deal with government shutdowns). In contrast, municipal elections happen on a fixed schedule, proceeding every four calendar years come hell or high water. (This philosophy is employed in the U.S. at all levels of government.)

What if a dysfunctional town council collapses halfway into its fixed term? Municipalities are "creatures of the province" with almost no guaranteed rights that cannot be stripped away by provincial legislation, and it is the province's thankless job to intervene.

In Saskatchewan in 2024, the provincial election happened to be called for October 28, while all municipal elections happening across the province were set for November 13. This close-but-not-exact overlap created an obnoxious time crunch for many, many politically involved people. In my own case, I was working as campaign GIS lead in Regina for all of October, so municipal politics were necessarily second priority.

After knocking a hundred doors on the 28th for Joan Pratchler (who, ahem, ended up beating a sitting cabinet minister by 7 points), I was finally free to go home and do the same thing in Val Marie.

The Platform

Val Marie, with its resident population of 120, has a very small tax base. The village government has very little leeway to spend money on anything other than basic services, so most options for a policy agenda are off the table. Why did I even put myself out there if I don't expect to have much power? My personal reason: tourism development requires that the village show up to professional stakeholder meetings sometimes, and with my day job sales experience I know that I'm good at leaving a positive impression on rural development types.

In a tiny community, I knew that everybody would already have some idea of who I am, so I thought I would re-iterate the personal basics:

I'm here by choice
My map business is a full-time thing
I'm a volunteer museum chair
I like to apply for grants

I also had the full endorsement of the runner-up from the 2020 election, who said that he had been the subject of unjustified rumours that he supported an expensive new water system (something which has proven to be a painfully high per capita expense in nearby Mankota and Climax). This proved to be the case on the doorstep, as multiple voters still remembered the water system gossip four years later.

I think Val Marie's appeal as a community has basically nothing to do with our water infrastructure, and there are so many other business development ideas that would be cheaper to try first. So I made sure to add a final line item into my platform:

Very specific fiscal conservative pledge

At the start of the campaign, I knew that I had probably only ever spoken to about half the people in town, so I decided to get whimsical with a more personal back side of the flyer. Here are the basic messages that I hoped to re-iterate:

You already know my family isn't from here, but I'm still a prairie person
My business is successful
Did you know I CONSTANTLY get asked about copyright traps?? Seriously, this comes up SO MUCH.

In the end, this kind of thing probably only changes 1 or 2 votes, especially in a tiny social environment where both candidates are already known to everybody. But it was honestly just fun to try and use my political skills in a non-partisan environment, and nobody could accuse me of not running a full-scale campaign.

Financial audit

The flyer ended up being my only campaign expense. I still have a few left over!

Line item	Cost
130 double-sided colour copies	$137.09
Canada Post neighbourhood mail delivery	$18.14

Total campaign expenditures: $155.23 ($4.31 per vote)

Sadly, just giving a $5 bill to every likely supporter would be very illegal.

Ten Miles from the Border

For a couple days around the U.S. election I finished all of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and drew 30 neurotic little depictions of my own face from memory, but otherwise I did not manage to change out of my pajamas or get any useful work done, so the effective campaign period was really a little shorter than two weeks.

Data Operation

With my flyers going out on the Friday before election day, I was free to spend the Remembrance Day long weekend canvassing. Uh-oh... there's a catch!

Section 53.1(1) says that the council may provide for the establishment and maintenance of a voter registry. Well, Val Marie doesn't.

Provincial and federal canvassers work off a big central voters list, maintained with data from the relevant election agencies (which collaborate with the CRA, so file your taxes correctly). Among its other uses, this crutch is an essential part of my electioneering social routine because I'm really not good with names. There was only one thing to do next.

Fearlessly hit the doors anyway? No, let's just make our own voter registry!!

With the help of five volunteers, I called a data meeting where we simply went... street by street... block by block... house by house... naming every resident in every building, from memory. I was really curious how accurately this could be done, but after two and a half hours, we were at something like 95% completion and estimated an electorate of 128 people. (More than our census population? Yes, any Saskatchewan resident who owns property inside the municipality can vote for mayor.)

In addition to being a useful social tool - because I was not about to open every conversation by asking "I'm Alex, who are you?" - we also used the list to do a rudimentary tiering operation, estimating the likelihood that every individual person in town would vote for me.

Tier	Description	Count
A	Likely supporters	50
B	Middle of the road	49
C	Unlikely supporters	19
IV	Ineligible to vote	10

Canvassing

It took two afternoons to hit every door in town, and I took a third afternoon to try all the uncontacted Tier As again. This pushed my contact rate up to an even 50%, which is great but could definitely have been improved with more lead time.

Most people do not make up their mind about politics because their door got knocked on once, but the data collected is a useful way to identify the needs and priorities of the general public, and it's also a great way to predict how the election will actually go.

Compared to my federal experience, I was shocked to discover that nobody would directly tell me that they were going to vote for my opponent - it just wouldn't be polite in a small town! I ended up getting all of four explicit negative responses. When you canvass for the NDP, this is much less of a problem. I realized early on that it was probably safe to assume that every single "undecided" voter was going to show up and vote for the incumbent.

With voter contact done, here's how things stood the night before the election:

For your reference, this is the NDP spreadsheet code: a 1 has explicitly said that they will vote for you, a 2 is a likely supporter, a 3 is undecided, and a 4 has explicitly said that they won't vote for you. Easy!

Tier	1	2	3/4
A	23	5	6
B	5	2	8
C	1	0	7

First of all, it was frankly incredible to see our tier list hold up this accurately, given that it was literally created off the top of a couple people's heads.

This put me on track to win 80% of A's, 45% of B's, and 10% of C's, provided that you assume...

...that I had recorded a representative sample of the electorate.
...that I was accurate at differentiating 2's and 3's.
...that nobody was lying to my face.

Three risky assumptions in politics, but if they all held true, then our simple tier model returns 64 votes for me (yay!!) against 55 votes for my opponent. In practice, I think 2. and 3. did hold up, but with such a tiny campaign, I assumed that my canvassing efforts were disproportionately reaching my own people. When I went to bed before the election, the most optimistic thing I was willing to believe was that the race was tied.

Election Day, November 13

In Saskatchewan, it is legal for a municipal candidate to spend all day watching people vote at the polling place! I decided to give this a shot, because with a 50% complete canvass sheet in my hot little hands, I would be able to cross names off the list and plan a bite-sized GOTV operation to go find any supporters who were late to show up. My colleague, the 2020 candidate, kindly tagged me out so I could go on a lunch break.

The Race for School Trustee

If you're an avid reader of my blog, you'll recall that the mayoral election was held concurrently with a contested school board election. With different franchise rules (anybody living within thirty miles of Val Marie could vote for public school trustee), this meant there were two separate tables inside the municipal hall, each independently checking voter ID.

Name recognition seemed to be a problem for school trustee... which makes sense because we live in an electoral subdivision with three schools, and neither of the two candidates were associated with ours. At least twenty voters declined a school ballot because "they didn't know either one". (The incumbent, Susan Mouland, had paid the same $18.14 as me to get her flyer placed in every mailbox in town two weeks previously - a great illustration of the limits of postal advertising.)

In practice, although the eligible electorate was much larger, only about five people came out from the countryside to vote for school trustee without being allowed to vote for mayor.

No such problem for me, every single person who walked in the door requested a mayoral ballot. I was the star of the show!

The Day Drags On

Turnout was very healthy. In fact, every single identified supporter voted without needing that 7pm follow-up! A great problem to have, so my GOTV operation ended up amounting to nothing. Parks Canada has a very large footprint in Val Marie, so there was a big rush starting at 4pm when many of the scientific staff get off work.

The final turnout for the municipal election was 82 votes. With no official voter registry, it's impossible to calculate turnout by percentage, but that's 69% based on my personal voter list, and a whopping 82% of our census adult population (math problem, guess how many adult residents they counted in 2021). In the end, there was a significant undervote for the council race on the same ballot, so I really was the star of the show!

At the end of a very long day of sitting on my butt, I was pessimistic: every single one of my identified supporters turned up, but there were quite a few people coming to vote who I hadn't been able to contact. In particular, I realized that I had made very few contacts inside the assets department of the Park, which is in charge of doing all the blue-collar stuff that keeps our local tourist attraction functioning. When these younger people started to show up at 5pm, I started to expect a close loss.

The Count

If you've been following all these numbers really closely, there was one pair of spoiled ballots for Mayor and Council: somebody had written some initials in the corner, seemingly by accident, but this is clear grounds for rejection under Canadian election law. I would like to remind all my supporters to not draw any identifying marks on their ballot!

Drama and excitement as the doors finally closed at 8pm. I overdramatically shook the box and said "It sounds like I'll lose by 7 votes", the signed seals were ripped open, the ballots were dumped in a big pile, the counting sheets were readied... and the count was tied until the halfway point!! Finally, Roland Facette pulled slightly ahead by a couple votes, and I realized the narrow lead was going to be insurmountable. I said some kind words to Rolly and wished him the best for his latest term. (With no recounts on the table, all of the election workers seemed very happy to finally go home.)

Things I Learned

I never wanted to say it, but I thought this race would just end up being a census of old families vs. transplants. Wrong! It's fair to say that I did better with newcomers, but during voter contact I was surprised on both counts by a number of exceptions.
I had been wanting to meet everybody in town for years anyway, I just knew that I was never going to do it unless there was some kind of challenge behind it.
I identified 36 1's and 2's, and I ended up getting 36 votes.
The Sask NDP typically gets 15 or 16 votes in the Val Marie polling place, so I can now officially call myself an electoral overperformer. Thank you, thank you!
Actually, there were multiple partisan NDP supporters who did not support my mayoral campaign.
Traditional field strategies are a very effective basis for predicting the result of a small-scale election.
Nobody mentioned either my known affiliation with the NDP, or the fact that I was visibly married to another man when I first moved to town.
Losing was a relief. There is nothing like talking to every voter in town to make you realize that being elected to any public position is a solemn and terrifying responsibility.

In the end, it really was about the friends we made along the way: I was able to mobilize eight volunteers and I could have had access to even more, except there is absolutely no practical need for a large volunteer operation in an electorate of 118. My people were really passionate... and therefore tended to be more eager to get on my spreadsheet, it turned out.

Having lost a few races in my life: if you expect politics to satisfy your desire for fame and fortune, you'll run out of motivation really quickly, but working with a core group of dedicated people who like the things you represent is usually enough to keep me going. Thank you to everybody who has been a part of this community over the years!

End of 2024 Switch Game Roundup

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

During the recent Saskatchewan provincial election, I was back in a traditional office environment for the first time in 5 years. I expected that the intense election environment would be taxing in unexpected new ways. Yeah, I ran into an unexpected one, all right: I actually had to put my work down when I left the office, and I found it very difficult to cope. It turns out my glamorous work-from-home lifestyle involves a lot of, well, nearly constant work.

To cope with those long evenings with no GIS projects to nervously pick away at, I decided to start catching up on random indie games published for my Nintendo Switch (which I only bought in 2023... you couldn't accuse me of being with the times). Here are my opinions in approximately chronological order. As usual, they are infallible AND inerrant.

Dungeons of Dreadrock (9/10)

$2 puzzle game. Great value for a very minimal price!! This was a Reddit recommendation that tipped me off to the fact that I could buy Switch back catalog games for cheap.

Super Mario Wonder (7/10)

The game that made me realize my money might be better spent on $2 puzzle games. A HUGE improvement over New Super Mario Bros U, which I would give a 4/10 or a 5/10. But it's too late, I'm just kind of tired of the 2D Mario game formula at this point in my life. By the way, I love the typography in this game, the UI looks really good and crisp.

Fez (10/10)

Since I haven't played any indie games for 10 years, I decided to stack the deck by looking up the all-time classics first. I happen to really like puzzle platformers, so this one was a shoo-in.

Apparently I've become an iPad baby since I was in grade school, because it was very jarring to realize that this is a game best played with a blank sheet of paper in front of you... you know, like how EVERY game used to be?? Get out your notebook from the beginning and I think this would be even more of a fun game to play blind, I would confidently say that it's possible to get to 64 cubes (100%) without a walkthrough if someone just tips you off at the start that there are intense puzzle elements.

Braid, Anniversary Edition (10/10)

Another all-time puzzle platformer, very smart and fun to play. Fez distracts you with a bunch of conventional platformer levels, so you can go a long time without realizing it's a puzzle game (or maybe this is just me? I'm not necessarily smart). Braid has fewer distractions, so you have to get good fast! I only had to look up 2 puzzles (and regretted looking up one of them, the other one WAS totally bullshit and the solution I had been trying was better).

This one is famous for its dense narrative, which made the mistake of assuming that gamers can read.

Donut County (8/10)

My kind of game. Not much playtime but the ukulele soundtrack and low poly aesthetic really stuck with me, definitely worth the experience.

I will play any Katamari-like so please recommend me obscure ones.

Superhot (7/10)

Wanted to play this one forever since my friend wouldn't let me try. Plays exactly like how it looks in video, I really liked the minimal aesthetic and precise strategy element. I found the plot jarringly mediocre, which I probably shouldn't care about in a gameplay-focused puzzle shooter, but the "less is more" design philosophy is otherwise so well applied that the solidly regular narrative seems out of place.

Katamari Damacy Reroll (9/10)

I never owned a PlayStation and Katamari was probably the franchise I was most disappointed about missing out on. The Switch port is everything I ever wanted!! I found the pacing and difficulty to be surprisingly well-polished, it's a ridiculous game but I found the gradual mastery of the gameplay and the storyline to both be very solid.

We Love Katamari Reroll (7/10)

The actual levels play better than the first Katamari, but it's obviously a sequel that was just thrown together because a sequel needed to exist. The level of disjointed ridiculousness exceeds what I find credible, even for the Katamari series!!!

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (8/10)

Very beautiful game

Disco Elysium (10/10)

What if you were in Quebec? Being divorced adds a new dimension to the immersive narrative of this game, I recommend it.

Picross S9 (Cognitohazard)

This shit is dangerous. I have stayed up until 4am with this damn game multiple days this week. Please do not recommend rote, content-heavy puzzle games to me if you value my personal wellness. There are EIGHT MORE??

Games I Didn't Really Give A Fair Shake

You're reading MY blog, so I can still review games that I found uncompelling enough to not finish. I still paid for them, damn it. Start your own blog if you don't like it.

Bridge Constructor Portal (4/10)

Seems like decent value but it's too much like a phone game.

Grapple Dog (3/10)

Looks cute but it didn't hold my attention.

Teslagrad Remastered (2/10)

Does not look cute. This art style has not aged well. Did not hold my attention after the first technically difficult jump.

Generalizing Divided Highways in QGIS

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here's a simple little map of Edmonton, Alberta. If you happen to be an Edmontonian, you might know something about the city's legal municipal boundary, and most people are generally aware that the North Saskatchewan River has a diagonal southwest-northeast course. But to actually find yourself on a map like this, you're probably going to look at the major roads in town.

Let's strip off all the other details: here's the comfortingly round shape of the Anthony Henday Drive, Canada's first complete ring road. The ring is punctured by the Yellowhead Highway, connecting Winnipeg to the Pacific Ocean. In the south, Alberta Highway 2 leads straight to Calgary, that other city (which obnoxiously remains slightly larger than Edmonton).

All around the world, if a city is dominated by things moving on rubber tires, its residents are probably going to use major roads as landmarks. This is very important if you want to publish maps that people can easily understand!

So this is normal cartography stuff so far, right? Roads are built by governments, governments create digital files, and cartographers load digital files into their favourite GIS software. I probably just downloaded these road lines from some official source.

WRONG - this is yet another part of my job that gets obnoxiously difficult FAST. You can follow along at home by downloading the 2024 National Road Network (289MB) - most provinces also maintain their own in-house alternatives to this file. Let's slap it into our canvas:

Pet peeve: you can buy an endless supply of SEO-optimized map posters on Etsy showing "every road" in [common geographic search term]. Every road!! This must look really impressive to laypeople, but the fact is, all the real work is being done by your tax dollars. It takes almost no technical GIS skill to download the NRNF, which is free, and churn out endless thousands of machine-generated pdfs. Of course, if you're already reading this blog post, you're probably not the type of person I need to lecture about the enshittification of my industry.

This level of detail is pretty, but it's not useful. These intricate road patterns are going to visually overwhelm any project we drop them into. How do we pick out just the important ones?

In GIS, every dataset has a spatial component and a database component, i.e., a spreadsheet attached to the lines we see on the map. Let's dig into that spreadsheet and see whether the government included some kind of internal hierarchy of importance.

We're in luck! Statistics Canada has included a spreadsheet field called CLASS. In Edmonton, it looks like CLASSes of 10, 21, and 22 denote major roads: the overwhelming majority of regular city streets are CLASS 23.

Are you the type of person to ignore official metadata? I sure am. But this is a tutorial, so I have to pretend to be more diligent than I really am. Instead of wasting time puzzling over what this CLASS business is all about, we can go straight to the Statistics Canada source. Behold:

Class	Textual description
10	Highway
11	Expressway
12	Primary highway
13	Secondary highway
20	Road
21	Arterial
22	Collector
23	Local

Hmm, it looks like the government is bad at its job: Edmonton definitely has primary and secondary highways, but this dataset doesn't use CLASSes 12 or 13 for any road in Alberta. And what's up with the northeastern portion of the Henday being encoded as 23? That's definitely a freeway, and it's been open for years. We're running into a pretty significant data quality issue here.

Let's just ignore these data quality issues for now and do the fastest thing available: filter the dataset for all CLASSes below 22.

Ugh, random freckles too? Yes, it turns out the NRNF has a couple random specks of 20 (Road, unclassified) mixed into the dataset. This kind of badly cleaned data is unfortunately a very common sight in my experience!

In cartography, you're never far away from having to do a bunch of manual labour. Let's just skip the really boring stuff, I took some time to perform my own filtering of the NRNF dataset. Wouldn't it be nice if this could be computerized...

Freeways have one very obnoxious trait: they're divided. The two directions of traffic are physically separated, with grass between them. That means most major roads in North America, when they finally get entered into an official GIS dataset, are represented by two (or more!) lines in space. Behold the random variety of median widths that have been constructed by Central Alberta's finest traffic engineers! This quality is obscured by distance, but not erased - the separation of Highway 2 (heading south to Leduc, then Calgary) is clearly visible at this scale.

This level of detail is great for Google Maps, but when you're just using roads as a simple reference for a thematic mapping project, it looks really untidy to have a bit of quaver on all of your line weights. Even if you're not an obsessive artist, it's never good practice to use a dataset that's too accurate and detailed for the task at hand. Let's FIX it!!

Um... although ArcGIS and QGIS are generally very comparable in functionality, sometimes the open-source alternative has less features than its corporate competitor. Here I have to admit that ArcGIS comes equipped with a tool right out of the box for this exact problem: Merge Divided Roads.

But do I LOOK like I have a hundred bucks for a software license?? Well... maybe, but I can think of better recipients for it than the ESRI corporation. Let's use a sequence of processing tools that ARE available in QGIS.

Whenever I have to run a sequence of QGIS geoprocessing algorithms more than once, I like to use the Model Designer, which has a nice GUI and makes it easy to repeat the same steps over and over. Here's the list:

Start with any pair of parallel lines that you want to coalesce into a single center line.
Run Densify by interval, to make sure that both lines have a similar vertex density. I like to use 5 meters as the interval here, but you can experiment. Smaller values will start to really bog down your computer.
Run Extract vertices.
Run Voronoi polygons. (Wikipedia)

What have we just done? Let's illustrate it with the northeastern corner of Calgary's Stoney Trail.

I am a very visual thinker so I can struggle to explain this stuff with words: let's just say that Voronoi math is a computationally simple way to trace out a nearly perfect-looking center line.

A better algorithm designer (maybe the one on ESRI's payroll?) could probably automate this process even further. I'm not going to be doing this in more than a few cities a year, so I am fine with this level of effort. Let's use QGIS trace digitizing to draw a new line that follows the path suggested by our Voronoi shapes.

There's one more big problem we have to deal with: although our center line is pretty elegantly smooth, we had to make some sacrifices back at the Densify by interval stage. Subtle imperfections are inevitable, but they will all be smaller than the distance we set in that step. Here's an example of the bumpy "washboarding" effect that can happen:

Only one thing to do about it! After tracing your center lines, run the QGIS Simplify algorithm on them, and use the same tolerance distance that you set in Densify by interval. For reasons that I only vaguely remember from signal processing classes in undergrad, this should fix all your problems. (Plus, it's good practice to simplify any big dataset that you're using for a cartographic project anyway.)

One more thing: intersections can behave a little oddly and you should probably be manually checking those as well. With this, I have no more to teach you.

Let's zoom in and check out the results:

We did it... yet another problem solved without needing to buy an ArcGIS license! (There are some additional ArcGIS problems that arise with proprietary file formats, I am absolutely not the right guy to help you with those ones.)

In my career, I've worked with a number of desktop GIS users who tend to neglect this kind of cartographic generalization work. Why? Most people are working on projects with a specific technical purpose. And that specific purpose is usually much more interesting than freeway median separations are.

Here's my best argument: because my work LOOKS polished, and a little traditional, it tends to get automatically trusted by the general public. (And that's terrifying!)

Yes, we live in an era of information overload, and it's created a very standard "half-heartedly made in GIS" visual style. So why not start taking the time now to question more aspects of your data sources and pick up some of the basics of cartographic generalization? Even if it seems like it's all being done for vanity, the habits you learn here will probably serve you well in the analysis portion of your workflow too.

Saskatchewan School Board Elections (Part 1)

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Saskatchewan's fixed-date municipal elections approach on November 13, a date well-known to myself because I am currently running for mayor of Val Marie. (Please spare the applause, this is a contested race.)

A mass mailout reminded me that, on the same day that I have the opportunity to vote for myself, I will also be asked to elect a Chinook School Board Trustee. The little village of Val Marie, you see, lies within Subdivision 7.

I think of myself as a fairly politically involved person, but with no children of my own currently enrolled in Saskatchewan's crumbling public schools, I had honestly never considered that my rural school division would have its own electoral geography. Being comprised only of the three small communities of Ponteix, Val Marie, and Vanguard, plus their expansive rural catchment areas, Subdivision 7 rings in with a cumulative population of 3,571.

Residents of Chinook Subdivisions 1-6 will miss the opportunity to vote: all of their races have already been won by acclamation, a common situation in this thinly populated part of the world. I cannot imagine that a sudden, intense public interest in school board governance would actually be a good thing, so I wish the acclaimed candidates all the best.

There is almost nothing that annoys me more than geographic information that clearly exists, but has never been loaded into any kind of open data hub. Here is Chinook School Division's official election map for the public:

These subdivision maps were clearly made by various GIS professionals inside the Ministry of Education, and the boundaries of the school divisions themselves can be downloaded by anybody thanks to the saskatchewan.ca REST server. But I have not been able to find any single, official source for GIS files describing these electoral subdivisions. We just have to rely on a random collection of .pdfs (although a couple divisions at least publish some legal boundary descriptions).

Because I get bored really easily, I decided to spend an afternoon geo-referencing and digitizing these .pdfs by hand. Among other things, this lets me run some simple statistical analysis on them. I just can't stand voting in any election where I haven't manually checked the population variance of the districts!!

To my surprise, rural voting subdivisions are actually pretty evenly balanced. As of the 2021 census, Chinook's extremities are Subdivision 6 (Shaunavon) with 4,481 residents, against Subdivision 1 (Leader) with 2,959. This is still a big disparity by the standards of Saskatchewan's strictest-in-the-country provincial ridings, which can't exceed 5% deviation from the average population, but at the municipal level it's positively equitable.

What's going on with Division 8, a.k.a. Swift Current, the only city under Chinook's jurisdiction? This community has a respectable population of 16,750 and elects 3 trustees - that's 5,583 residents per trustee, blowing Shaunavon out of the water.

However, Swift Current and Shaunavon both have one thing in common: they each contain one Catholic school run by the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School Division, based out of Moose Jaw. In Western Canada, voters are asked at the ballot box if they support their public OR their Catholic school district, and are accordingly presented with a single roster of candidates. No double-dipping!

If we assume that a few hundred ratepayers select a "Catholic preference", then Subdivision 6 contains fewer public school voters than we think, and the districts are more equal than their census population counts indicate. (The Canadian census does not enumerate school preference, and many non-Catholic parents will send their children to a Catholic school for any number of cynical reasons.)

After picking apart Chinook, did I get really bored and end up digitizing all 139 geographical subdivisions that elect public school board trustees in the entire province of Saskatchewan? The answer is yes, but I'll save that for a future post...

Building a Simple Thematic Map

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I am really proud of my work as a cartographer. There is one thing I feel is difficult to communicate to people outside the field: exactly how much effort it all takes!!

On one hand, at my best I can make it look really easy. On the other hand, most people assume that my job is borderline magical in the first place. Let me demystify the process by reverse-engineering all of the actual milestones that go into a typical small project, from beginning to end.

This is a brief, conceptual walk through my everyday workflow. Actually implementing these design choices with software is outside the scope of this post. For the record, you can download QGIS and Inkscape for free to do everything I do, right now.

Setting a scope

Let's say that you published an award-winning map of Saskatchewan (ahem) that sold 2,000 copies in a year, and you want to add some exciting new features to your second print run. How about a cute little population density inset?

Choosing a reasonable scope is a good way to start any project. We have our jurisdiction (the province of Saskatchewan) and our demographic variable (population density). Here are two additional considerations: it needs to be easily readable when printed at 2 inches tall, as well as fully colourblind accessible.

Okay, that's enough thinking about the assignment. This map has a suitable theoretical basis. Let's untangle all the assumptions and random pieces of local knowledge that went into making it!

Finding a source

Almost all of the data I work with already exists out there somewhere, I am just a specialist in making it look good.

We are going to be getting population counts from the 2021 census. Lucky us: we can go straight to Statistics Canada's inventory of official census data products, which are designed to pair perfectly with Statistics Canada's inventory of official census boundaries. Navigating federal government websites is difficult and tedious, but at least we can be pretty confident that we are getting the best possible information straight from the source.

Wait a minute, there are so many different downloads here...

Choosing a level of detail

Statistics Canada offers the same census data at all kinds of levels of geographic detail. Check out the five most standard:

Can you guess which one actually conforms to administrative reality? "Census subdivisions" are a complete inventory of every municipality and Indian reserve, and are revised whenever new municipalities are created or destroyed. The other four datasets here either arbitrarily lump them together, or arbitrarily break them apart. This is done at Statistics Canada's discretion.

I feel like a very common misconception about my work is that I must always be trying to create "the most accurate" map. Wrong! The most accurate population density map would use dissemination blocks, but how useful is that going to be when we only have two inches of space on the page?

Yes, okay, yes, I am being a little unfair by showing all the census block boundaries in solid black. (It's nothing personal!! I love that census block data exists, and I use it for all kinds of projects.) We can eliminate those outlines, immediately creating a more readable product:

But I still don't really like this.

On a conceptual level, it's pretty, but the extremely fine detail is visually distracting. Most census blocks are smaller than the average farm, so our light pink "zero" colour pops up EVERYWHERE. This means we're actually losing our ability to quickly compare the density of rural settlement in different parts of the province.
On a temporal level, the boundaries of census blocks are extremely arbitrary, and change between censuses all the time. Even if the province's population was frozen in place for the next 5 years, the next census would use different blocks, and this map would end up looking different. We can't stop our data from getting old, but a little bit of future-proofing never hurts.
On a technical level, this is a ridiculous amount of superfluous detail for a 2 inch map! Your digital printer can probably still handle a 50MB file meant to be the size of your finger, but a huge amount of detail will be lost and you ought to be nicer to your equipment.

For most GIS users, I find there is a sort of beginner's euphoria once a person first gains the technical ability to process and visualize huge government datasets in their raw form. Certainly nobody ever told ME that something as beautiful and complex as the 2021 dissemination block data even existed, much less that it was free to any member of the public. You can see all kinds of viral data-is-beautiful posts everywhere on the internet that show a complete information overload, often to the point of practical uselessness.

I personally like that census subdivisions are the most firmly "real": most laypeople are aware of the name of their municipality. I DON'T like that Saskatchewan is full of tiny, enclaved towns that are completely impossible to pick out in images 3-5. This makes me favour consolidated subdivisions, which look tidy, are broadly comparable across the province, and haven't changed much in 100 years. We have our starting point!

Manual revisions to the data

On all five of these maps, you can see that Northern Saskatchewan (where the topsoil runs out) is dramatically less populated than the other half of the province. On the subdivision, DA, and DB maps, you can see that Northern Saskatchewan's population (which still exists, and numbers about 40,000) is extremely concentrated into small urban clusters. But the consolidated subdivisions map, although ideal for tidying up the southern half of the province, doesn't show these northern communities at all. Let's mix and match two different census datasets:

Looking better already! Unfortunately, at our target 2-inch size, almost all of the oddly-shaped subdivisions in the north are unreadable, and I happen to know that their shapes aren't really related to their populated footprints anyway. Just looking at these boundaries, you might incorrectly think that Black Lake (the triangle at the very top of the province) is the largest community in Northern Saskatchewan.

How could we be a little more fair? After a bit of experimentation with different shapes and different radii, I decided to draw a 9-kilometer circle around every major population centre. This is completely arbitrary, but it's a decent enough fit for the reality of life in the North, where space is plentiful and a large minority of people will often live in cabins a short distance away from the nearest urban community. (While seasonal properties can be found in the most remote locations, almost nobody maintains a permanent address in the true middle of nowhere.)

It worked! You can now distinguish the bigger communities from the smaller communities at a single glance, and even without knowing anything about Saskatchewan, it's easy to spot the two biggest northern population centres.

You might notice a few odd nodules on some of these circles. Although we can often safely assume that nobody lives in the extreme corners of a large northern municipality, I don't think this assumption is safe enough, so I've made some manual revisions to accomodate administrative boundaries as needed.

Are we done yet? No... there are some other judgment calls with the consolidated subdivisions that I don't like.

If you look really closely, you'll notice that Statistics Canada decided to avoid consolidating Saskatoon with its surrounding R.M. of Corman Park, but they DID consolidate Regina with its surrounding R.M. of Sherwood. Their rationale was probably that Sherwood has a much smaller population, but I think the final result looks awkward and establishes a weird double standard.
If you look really, really closely, you'll see a bit of mess ("border gore") in the boundaries of some southern CCDs. This is because some First Nations, in recent decades, have successfully sued the government and earned uninhabited land as compensation for historical broken treaties. This "Treaty Entitlement" land is often scattered randomly across multiple municipalities, and the census is very inconsistent about whether to recognize its existence or not.
If you look really, really, really closely, you'll see that CCDs never break any municipal boundaries, even when it would make sense. For instance, the City of Prince Albert has a large tentacle extending north of the North Saskatchewan River, not because of any human neighbourhoods, but because it adds a lumber mill to the city tax base.

Although most of them are really barely noticeable, I used provincial government boundary data to manually fix all these little problems.

All these manual revisions require re-calculating the area of every shape we're drawing, although our population counts are still 100% rooted in the census. You can see a few spots where this ends up bumping a region between density brackets.

Simplifying the geometry

It NEVER hurts to make sure that a final printed product has a reasonable file size. Can you spot the difference between these two maps?

Your computer sure can! The map on the left rings in at 5.3 MB in its original file format, and the map on the right is a mere 122 KB. Here's what that looks like behind the curtain:

The fully detailed file will still be necessary in case you need to update any of the data, so don't throw it away! Choosing a level of simplification is one of the many completely arbitrary steps in my everyday workflow, and everybody has a different preference for how extreme they're willing to get.

Choosing a colour scale

At this point in the post, you're probably pretty used to my colour scale, but how exactly did I settle on ¼, 1, 2, 4, 10, and 25 as my "break points"? The answer is a lot of manual trial and error. Let's test some basic assumptions.

It's easy to naively assume that the colour scale on a map should be perfectly linear. That leaves no room for bias, right?

This is not inaccurate, but it's unsatisfactory for a few reasons. (One of the more annoying ones is that the larger city of Saskatoon falls into a lower density bracket.) So it's obvious that the big cities are very different from the rest of the province, what if we just cap the map at 25 while keeping a linear scale?

This is also not technically inaccurate, but we're still missing out on a lot of detail.

For reasons that I am honestly not fully in the loop about, logarithmic scales are usually a better choice for a wide diversity of human datasets: every society on Earth tends to naturally develop a predictable hierarchy of town population sizes. (See Zipf's law if you want to be mildly disturbed by the similarities between the size of every town in Saskatchewan and the length of every word in Don Quixote.)

Let's use some high school math to calculate four logarithmic break points between ¼ and 25... and hey, these numbers look kind of familiar!

I actually didn't originally use this method to calculate my colour scale, I literally just tried a large variety of possible values after setting ¼ and 25 as my two cutoff points. (If you ever want to feel better about citing "random trial and error" as a problem-solving approach, just talk like a physicist and say that you used the Monte Carlo method).

The agreement between 1.6 vs. 2, 3.9 vs. 4, and 9.8 vs. 10 are surprisingly excellent. Math is kind of scary!

When evaluating the quality of your break points, it helps to think whether they actually correspond to any real distinctions that people might care about. In this case, I think the answer is yes! Here's how I do a common sense test on my final result:

Density bracket	Description
25 and up	Metropolitan areas
10 - 25	Regional cities
4 - 10	Towns big enough to have multiple car dealerships
2 - 4	Towns that struggle to retain car dealerships
1 - 2	Places where the farmers are a little wealthier
¼ - 1	What you see out the window on a road trip
Below ¼	Semi-arid cowboy country OR boreal wilderness

One final breakpoint tip: in general, I prefer to use nice round numbers because most members of the general public do not appreciate being reminded that logarithms exist.

Choosing a colour ramp

We're so close to the finish line! What's the deal with all this pink and purple?

A lot of population density maps on the internet use a green-to-red colour ramp that doesn't look too offensive, and most people intuitively "get" the emotional meaning behind the colours:

Here's the problem. About 1 in 15 white guys experience some form of red-green colourblindness, so green-to-red is actually one of the worst possible ramps you can pick for accessibility.

The way that different digital screens from different manufacturers display the same web colours differently is its own obnoxious can of worms. Don't even get me started on dealing with printers. Seriously.

Here's a simulation of what people with full red-green deficiency see in this map:

With the way that colour deficiencies are distributed in the general population, blue-yellow is the safest choice for a diverging colour ramp, but in general, nothing is safer than "photocopier-safe": colour ramps that are designed to work when reproduced in black and white. These are developed by people who study the human perception of colour and can be found in a few places around the internet. My favourite source is Fabio Crameri's scientific colour map website.

All of these choices are functional, but Crameri's purplish acton colour ramp is my personal favourite.

We're done!

At this point, we really have exhaustively picked apart every single assumption that went into the production of this little 2-inch population density map. It's ready to be slotted into its new home:

So, this is my a complete explanation of how even a small project can take an afternoon to do properly. Did I make it all sound like a lot of work? As you might notice by browsing through my portfolio, a lot of effort gets saved after I do something once: it's easy to settle into a limited set of favourite typefaces, colour schemes, and design approaches. Writing this was a fun exercise to see if each one of my ingrained habits really can be made to sound like defensible choices!

I was also surprised how many times I needed to cite "general knowledge of life in Saskatchewan" as a source that directly led to me making particular design decisions. I still feel like I'll never fully understand this province, but at least I can convincingly talk my way through the gaps!

If I have something encouraging to say here at the end, the design fundamentals described in this post have changed surprisingly little with the digital revolution. Meanwhile, all of the tedious software-oriented grunt work that I DIDN'T mention (joining files, data entry, automatically colouring 300 individual map polygons) is either fully automatic, or easier today than it ever has been. So if you are a novice GIS user, the balance of interesting creative decisions to brainless software operation is at a historic peak. What are you waiting for?