What is the CCRI?
The CCRI is a research infrastructure based on manuscript census records for the period from 1911 to 1951. The infrastructure facilitates research for the study of social, economic, cultural and political change. In connection with other databases that cover the periods from 1871 to 1901, and from 1961 to 2001, the researcher has an unprecedented foundation for exploration of the transformation of Canadian society from the late 19th century to the late 20th century.
Census enumerations contribute to and reflect changes in Canadian society. From the questions that were asked to the responses that were written down, census documents provide evidence about the lives of residents in Canada as well as the aspirations and thinking of those responsible for each enumeration. As a result, scholars, including historians, sociologists, demographers, geographers, and economists, will be able to use the infrastructure for diverse research projects. In addition, specialists in other fields will find aspects of the CCRI significant. Media scholars, for example, will be able to contribute to our understanding of the history of communications by focusing on a question posed in 1931 that asked if the household had a radio. Researchers will be able to examine aspects of World War II by studying the relevant questions about military service posed in the 1941 and 1951 enumerations. Urban and rural planners will be able to inquire about housing, size of dwellings, and place of residence. These examples are but some of the ways in which the CCRI supports unprecedented analyses of Canada's transformative decades. But even more importantly, the CCRI raises questions about the making of twentieth-century Canada that we have not yet even imagined. In this sense, the full research enabled by the CCRI will only be known in the years to come.
The CCRI databases from manuscript census records for the period 1911 to 1951 form the core of a much larger research infrastructure. To help construct explorations into Canadian society, the CCRI has two major components: primary sources and secondary sources.
The primary sources include a range of documents created during the census periods, including census enumeration returns from 1911 to 1951, and contextual evidence made up of Statistics Canada (formerly the Dominion Bureau of Statistics) documentation, newspapers, and political debates at both the federal and provincial levels.
The secondary data sources are intended to facilitate research on the primary sources and are equally varied in nature. They range from introductory descriptive statements about the census enumeration process to highly technical discussions of data entry and coding issues, and bibliographies of census-research publications.
Integral to the entire project is the geographic framework for the historical census data using a Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS map layers enable geographic location, selection, aggregation and analysis of sample data, as well as some mapping of generalized census data. This allows researchers to ask questions of the database which are much more geographically specific than in the past. Interface tools to make these geographic queries and analysis as user-friendly as possible are a developed component of the infrastructure.
Moreover, one of the central goals of the CCRI has been the construction of a series of contextual databases related to the making and taking of the censuses. These "data on data" will provide researchers with the evidence necessary to undertake informed and critical analysis of the making, taking, and reception of the census within its historical context. Whereas the microdata derived from census manuscripts will enable research into the hidden history of the individual lives of Canadians, the contextual data will make possible inquiries about the making and interpretation of that data.
