Maps: Newspapers and the Web

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

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Annual Internet spending

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Annual spending on newspapers

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For people in my line of work, the fate of newspapers is concentrating the mind, as Samuel Johnson is supposed to have said, wonderfully.

So it seemed like as good a week as any for two maps based on the 2006 census: household spending on newspapers and household spending on the Internet.

There are several pockets of high newspaper readership in the GTA. In Toronto, one is in the high-income corridor along Yonge north of Bloor, and another along the Kingsway. In the 905, there is one in southern Oakville, and others in Woodbridge and Unionville. There are consistently higher rates of newspaper spending in the outer 905.

Spending on the Internet tracks income very closely, with the income map of Toronto duplicated almost perfectly. Rural areas are fairly consistently in the $2-300 range.

Map of the Week: Smoking, redux

STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR

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One of the limitations on our online mapping projects has been that maps with large numbers of polygons (or two-dimensional shapes, as seen in a map of city neighbourhoods) are slow to display, especially in IE. Another was that the polygons themselves had to be created by hand. This meant that the 200-odd postal codes in the GTA were about the outer limit of what we could display. More ambitious maps, like one depicting all the electoral districts in the province, were impractical both for us to create and for a reader to load.

So I was delighted when Sanjay Singh of Pitney Bowes Business Insight approached us with alternative way of creating this kind of map which elegantly solves both problems. Without going into the details, it involves two techniques which I had tried at different times but not together, which turns out to be the key.

For the first week of Map of the Week 2.0, we have a map showing smoking patterns in the GTA (unfortunately not including Durham for now) by census tract. Just over a thousand areas are represented. This map loads much more quickly than our .xml format in Firefox and IE, but if there are any unexpected issues please let us know in the comments.

The map shows average annual expenditure on smoking.

Back in August, we created a smoking map covering the whole province by health region (identical to city/county/regional municipality in most cases). That map showed a concentration of smokers in rural and northern areas, and the GTA map shows something of the same pattern within our own region.

Rural/deep suburban regions spend much more on tobacco than the rest of the GTA, with the highest tobacco spending being around Kettleby. There is a pocket of very low tobacco spending in northern Brampton, interestingly.

Within Toronto, Lawrence Park, Hogg's Hollow, chunks of Forest Hill and the Bridle Path all have higher-than average tobacco spending, while the traditional low-income V seems to have lower rates. Looking more closely at neighbourhoods, there does seem to be a rough positive correlation between income and tobacco spending.

Santa Claus Fund

I would be remiss not to mention the Star's Santa Claus Fund, which has been providing Christmas gifts to needy children since 1906. Online donations can be made here.

Here is an appeal made to readers before Christmas, 1909:

Map of the Week: Riverdale's First World War dead

Updated Nov. 10 - see note below.

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This week's map is an exercise in recovering lost urban memory.

I have identified almost 200 individual homes in Riverdale and the neighbourhood immediately north of the Danforth where the worst fears of the householder -­ wife, parent or sibling of a Canadian soldier overseas during the First World War - were realized a boy came to their front step with a dreaded telegram, instead of the man whose return they hoped for. For some, the news was final; for others, a long hospital vigil ended when a young man lost a painful struggle with the damage from shrapnel or gas.

The map gives an idea of the extent of cultural trauma which led to the Remembrance Day rituals, by looking at how the war scarred one neighbourhood. A large-scale disaster can sometimes seem incomprehensible; it is often only by looking at particular cases that we start to grasp a sense of what happened.

The war harrowed Riverdale on a mercilessly intimate scale:

In a row of five houses near Fulton and Carlaw, three lost sons in a six-week period in 1918 near Arras.

One-block Fenwick Avenue lost four men, as did one-block Garnock Avenue and one-block Wardell St.

One long block of Eaton Ave., east of Pape, lost six.

It is possible to stand at the corner of Garnock and Hampton and see five houses, including two pairs of next-door neighbours, who lost a son or husband.

Two homes, one on Riverdale Ave. and one on Hogarth, lost two sons. In the Riverdale Ave. case, one of them lied about his age to enlist.

For every actual death, there were many more families which lived with their dread, silently or otherwise. What it was like to live in the neighbourhood by the fall of 1918 is hard to imagine at this point; our only really good tool would be fiction.

The map was prepared from the excellent database at the Canadian Great War Project site. The search process was very cumbersome, and it wasn't possible to search for soldiers from First Ave., south of Gerrard between Logan and Broadview, or Strathcona Ave., off Pape south of the Danforth. 

I have added several streets north of Riverdale’s traditional boundary at the Danforth.

Every marker links to up to three documents: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for the soldier, the Department of Veterans Affairs page, which often links to other resources such as press clippings, and images of the soldier's attestation papers, prepared when he enlisted. Not all markers have all three links. The address on attestation papers is not always the address of next of kin at death, which is what the map is based on.

If you live in Riverdale and the area a few blocks north of the Danforth (pictured at left), you may want to consider the following:

The older a house is, the more of the texture of everyday life has flowed through it - birth, death, joy, tragedy. Some people who live in old houses enjoy the traces of people who lived there before, like coal grates and worn floorboards, and others carefully erase them all.

It’s rooted in personal things: our attitude to home, history and culture play a part.

A home pinpointed on the map may be where you now live. Whether you want to know this is for you to decide.

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Update, November 10:

Thanks to commenter John McLean for pointing out two soldiers from Eastmount Ave., north of the Danforth, who belonged on the map – when I looked into it more closely, I ended up adding four from Eastmount and three from Muriel Ave., near Pape and Danforth.

I’d place Private Russell Devall (http://ow.ly/B7Ni) on the on the map if I had a street address – we know his parents lived on Muriel, but not exactly where. His attestation papers aren’t on line.