Miskatonic University Press

Mapping the Indian Residential School Locations Dataset

code4lib geo r york

My colleague Rosa Orlandini’s Residential School Locations Project was used in a workshop today as an example of best practices in making data openly available. It is one result of her sabbatical work last year, which I couldn’t hope to summarize properly, but the metadata explains more about it, the Wikipedia article Canadian Indian residential school system gives background, and you can email her for more.

When I looked at the data and saw Indian Residential School Locations Dataset (CSV Format) I loaded it up into R and made a quick map. (If you try to get the data by hand it makes you agree to terms and conditions even though it’s CC-BY, which I’ll report, but I found that if you link directly to the CSV there’s no problem.)

library(tidyverse)
library(maps)
ca_map <- map_data(map = "world") %>% filter(region == "Canada")

read_csv("https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/api/access/datafile/75625?format=original&gbrecs=true") %>%
   ggplot() +
   geom_polygon(data = ca_map,
     aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group),
	 fill = NA, colour = "black") +
   coord_map(projection = "gilbert") +
   geom_point(data = irs_locations, aes(x = Longitude, y = Latitude)) +
   labs(title = "Indian Residential Schools Location Dataset",
        subtitle = "Data provided by Rosa Orlandini (https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/RIYEMU) (CC-BY)",
        caption = "William Denton (CC-BY)",
        x = "", y = "")
Map of Indian Residential Schools
Map of Indian Residential Schools

It’s hard to see some of the dots, and there are factors in the data that would be useful to show, like religious affiliations of the schools, but as a first look it’s a decent start.