What this is
Charting Waterloo Region uses open data to answer plain questions about the place we live: how safe is it, how well do city services work, how is the region changing. Each post takes one question, finds the best available public data, and shows what the numbers say in a handful of carefully made charts.
Every chart is built in R and every post can be reproduced from the code and data in the GitHub repository. See Reproduce a post for the steps.
Two kinds of post
- Snapshot. A few charts and some basic analysis, readable in under five minutes.
- Deep dive. Many charts and more detailed analysis, taking a lot more than five minutes.
Every post is labelled with one or the other, and the categories list on the Posts page filters by kind or by topic.
Who writes it
Posts are written by Greg Berberich.
How the posts are made
- Sources are public. Statistics Canada tables, municipal open-data portals, published reports. Each post lists its sources, with links and licences, in a data section at the end.
- Charts follow one style. Direct labels instead of legends, no chart junk, the same three colours throughout: blue for Waterloo Region, red for a comparison such as Canada, grey for context.
- Nothing is hidden. The code, the cleaned data, and the rendered results all live in the repository. Large files are attached to GitHub Releases so anyone can download them.
- Everything is reusable. Text and charts are published under CC BY 4.0: copy, share, or republish them, including in the news, with credit to Charting Waterloo Region. The code is MIT licensed. Data stays under the licence of whoever published it.
Contact and corrections
Spotted an error or have a question about the data? Open an issue on GitHub.
