Month: April 2018

The Canadian government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants entering Canada between 1885 and 1923 in order to restrict immigration.   While a print register was created to keep track of the influx of migrants, the detailed recording resulted in years of demographic information about the immigrants that has become a rich source of data for researchers. These original records were painstakingly transformed to a digital spreadsheet, a project led by UBC history scholars from 2005 to 2007.  Yet the record was incoherent as records showed idiosyncratic dialects of the immigrants resulted in variations of placenames and titles.

From 2008 to 2010, a project to normalize various transliterations of the immigrants’ origins laid the groundwork for more in-depth research for future researchers was led by UBC’s Asian Library.  Driven by the curiosity about to what extent the data is used and how far we can go, Sarah Zhang conducted a study analyzing the data regarding the immigrants’ wellbeing and migration pattern. By leveraging the power of Palladio, a networking analysis intertwined with a set of visualizations designed for complex, multi-dimensional data, Sarah discovered some hidden patterns that contradict previous studies on this topic, revealing the substantive potential of this data waiting to be unlocked with further research.   Join us for an informative workshop on how this research was conducted and learn how to do some data analysis using this software.

Please download the following sample dataset before coming to the workshop.