Question
As you know, there are some special challenges associated with exploring the Canadian census through both time and geography dimensions. Are you aware of any papers that discuss these challenges that I could share with a group of graduate students?
Some context: I'm helping a GIS professor develop a lab for her graduate students in which they will use census data to make historical comparisons. For the lab, we'll likely stick to 1990s and 2000s data, but the students might explore further back for their own projects. They will be mostly interested in community-level data, so we're likely to be exploring data from dissemination areas or enumeration areas. The professor would like to assign some reading material to her students and has asked me for suggestions.
I'm already very aware of the challenges and obstacles students might encounter as they work on their own projects (and as we prepare our own instructions for the lab), and I have some good slides to share with the students. However, in my "papers and fun material to share with students when I can assign them readings before I show up" collection, I don't have much about the difficulties of historical census research. And this feels like the kind of topic for which other people might already have some references they could share.
Response
I am not familiar with other sources, but can recommend the following Statcan pubs:
From the Geography Working Paper Series (92F0138M):
1. The Population Ecumene of Canada: Exploring the Past and Present: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/92f0138m/92f0138m2008003-eng.htm
2. Geographic Structures As Census Variables: Using Geography to Analyse Social and Economic Processes: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/92f0138m/92f0138m2001001-eng.pdf
Also of potential interest:
Appendix 2.0 Census of Population and National Household Survey questionnaire content and derived variables since Confederation: http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/ref/dict/app-ann/a2_0-eng.cfm
Regarding historical comparison of geographic areas:
The boundaries and names of geographic areas can change from one census to the next. For this, you have the correspondence files, http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/geo/ref/cor-eng.cfm, which contain unique identifiers for the current census geographic area and the corresponding unique identifier for the previous census geographic area.
And presentations from the DLI Training Repository:
1. DLI National Training Day 2014 - Historical Census Statistics, by A Guindon & S Mowers: https://cudo.carleton.ca/dli-training/3713
2. Creating Historical Digital Census Boundary Maps for Canada, by A Petrov & L Ruus: https://cudo.carleton.ca/dli-training/2386
3. The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure: Locating and Interpreting Historical Microdata, by N Farnworth: https://cudo.carleton.ca/dli-training/2511
