&A bit of a mis­cel­lany, as are the maps, here’s a few of the data­sets I am com­pil­ing and play­ing with right now.

I am con­stantly find­ing I have to go into the lib­rary and manu­ally digit­ize data­sets for my ana­lyt­ical use. After spend­ing hours input­ting these tables, my hope is that I can save you from hav­ing to do the same in case you can use any of these sets.
All sets are in CSV format and freely downloadable.

I would also note the data visu­al­iz­a­tion ser­vices Many Eyes and Swivel where you can apply some stun­ning visu­al­iz­a­tions to your data and inter­act with oth­ers doing the same.

Ontario Dis­til­ler­ies and Brew­er­ies in 1914
This is a bit of an exper­i­mental present­a­tion using the new Exhibit frame­work from the Simile/SAIL folks. Its a small data­set (55 records), and this one will be more inter­est­ing over time, pos­sibly reflect­ing more effi­cient trans­port­a­tion or the chan­ging tastes of Ontario drink­ers. How­ever, from a data present­a­tion stand­point, the Exhibit frame­work is very cool, because you can work with this data (fil­ter, views) entirely within your browser. Try click­ing on the facets on the right hand side of the page, to turn vari­ous towns or types of enter­prises off and on. None of the oper­a­tions are pre­formed through any calls to the server or to a data­base. Rather slick. Lim­ited to a lesser num­ber of records, but very cool for those with a few inter­est­ing datasets.…

Huron County Tav­ern Keep­ers 1871
This is also an exper­i­mental present­a­tion using the Exhibit frame­work. Try click­ing on some of the facets on the right hand side of the page, to fil­ter the list by vari­ous demo­graphic factors.

Cana­dian Fed­eral Rail­way Charters