Public records, asked plain questions, and built into instruments you can run yourself.
Canada publishes an enormous amount about itself and then leaves it sitting there. The registers, the catalogues, the filings — all downloadable, almost none of it read.
So this is the series where I download it and read it. Each piece takes one public Canadian dataset, asks it a question a person would actually ask, and ends in something you can open and use rather than a chart you have to take my word for. The method is shown, the source is named, and the caveats are printed where you can see them.
A century of birth registrations, searchable by name. Every VIMY in 1917, every LINDA in 1947, and the question of what Ontario's most common boys' name actually is once you count the spellings.
Every distinct name in the Ontario register, tagged for what it was chosen to mean — strength, beauty, faith, wealth — and what that says about the decade that chose it.
About the series
Make It Make Toonies is written, built, and illustrated by me, Amanda Breeze — a creative technologist in Ontario, Canada. Every instrument here runs on public data, released under an open licence, and cites the release it came from.
The rule for choosing a subject: the data has to be public, the question has to be one an ordinary person would ask out loud, and nobody can have done it for Canada yet. That last part is easier to satisfy than it should be.
The chrome can be playful. The axes never joke.
If you'd like a piece like these for your publication or newsroom, or want to talk about a dataset, I'd love to hear from you.