Art and science meet to visualize the history of Nanaimo

Data was collected through census records and information collected through the Nanaimo Community Archives. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

Art and data meet in a new art piece now on display at Oliver Woods Community Centre, visualizing the history of Nanaimo.

Histogram Histories is the newest temporary public art installation from the City of Nanaimo, created by multi-disciplinary artist Kiranjot Kaur.

The piece is a hanging fabric installation located in the community centre’s lobby, showcasing different graphs tracking the changes of seven different data points across the city of Nanaimo throughout the last six decades.

Kaur explained to CHLY at Oliver Woods that the seven different graphs represent: population, number of languages spoken, maximum extreme temperature, minimum extreme temperature, number of restaurants, number of chinooks, and arrival patterns.

Kaur wanted to take their background as an engineer and their love for art to create the histograms to showcase the data that makes up Nanaimo.

“It's a histogram, which is like a chart. A histogram is a chart that counts something. So you can kind of count anything, in this case, we counted population and different demographic information as well as cultural information,” Kaur said. “It's data, which is usually interpreted as being cold and factual and boring.”

Growing up in a family-owned fabric store, Kaur said they wanted to have the data come alive with colourful fabrics used to create the graphs.

Data was collected through census records and information collected through the Nanaimo Community Archives.

“I originally thought that if I had some aerial maps of Nanaimo, I would be able to kind of calculate some statistics off of that. I was lucky to be able to go into the Nanaimo Archives and work with Jillian and Christine there, and they gave me some ideas. Actually, Christine came up with the idea for the number of restaurants. She's like, ‘oh, you need a cultural one, something that's fun, maybe restaurants.’ So the restaurant one is actually based on listings in the Yellow Pages,” she said. “So that's neat, because they have all these Yellow Pages from back in time, and you go through and you see them increase, and then you see them decrease, and then you're like, ‘are there actually fewer restaurants, or did people just stop listing in the Yellow Pages?’”

She said it was an interesting project, being able to research and look at the changes in the data for each of the graphs.

“So I think when we look at temperature, for example, temperature, it's been increasing, we know that, but like by a degree or two degrees or three degrees or something, and a lot of that change is condensed to the most recent decade,” she said. “So the decades before, that kind of looks like not much change is happening, and then visualizing it physically, because I just normalized everything to inches. But if you looked at the actual data, you're like, ‘oh, that is actually higher.’”

During the research stage, community members were able to add their own input about when they first arrived in Nanaimo, which Kaur incorporated, displaying their name and arrival year written on pink fabric sewn around the fabric cylinders of the arrival pattern graph.

More information about Kaur's research and photographs can be found on their website.

Histogram Histories is on display at the Oliver Wood Community Centre until 2030.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.