Social Planning Toronto - Language Map

As part of my work on the Toronto Language Map with Beth Wilson for Social Planning Toronto, the following maps were created using Statistics Canada census data and the Carto online mapping platform.

The final project resulted in three interactive maps that allows users to explore spatiotemporal trends in Toronto’s non-official language makeup over the past 10 years, using 2006, 2011 and 2016 census data.

The Carto mapping platform provided a drag and drop interface to create the maps, and widgets to allow easy customisation of a single layer restyled for each map. Each map was created with one single data table/map layer. The widgets on the right of the map can be used to re-style the map to just one language, or filter the layers based on categories (% ranges).











One challenge that influenced the development on the final maps was that we were aiming to display a total of 72 maps, with an intuitave and simple to navigate interactive interface:

2006: 23 maps

23 maps 2011: 24 maps

24 maps 2016: 25 maps

Carto proved to be the perfect fit to handle the requirements, with an out of box solution to allow on the fly layer restyling.

The primary layer that the user views when first loading the map is a combined map of top languages. Each language was assigned a unique color and a color range made up of shadings from darker to lighter based on a Census Tract's language % value. An attempt was made to assign related but different colors for different regions that languages originate from.

Languages in the widgets were ordered based on the percent the language represents of the total single responses to the census question, for each of the Census years.



The maps below are ordered by 2016 values.



