Welcome to TORONTOVERSE, a different way to look at your city.

Cities are complex ecosystems, full of personalities and institutions that are interconnected in all kinds of interesting ways. We want to reflect that joy and mystery back to you in a way that’s genuinely fun. Along the way, we also want to make you better informed about the place you live.

TORONTOVERSE is built around a brand-new database we call “Citygraph.” It’s a real-time graph that attempts to model the countless connections and interactions that bring our city to life. We fill it with data about streets and neighbourhoods, businesses and organizations — anything we can download — in an effort to capture a bit of the magic of the city.

Take a look at our map. Poke around. Or, if you prefer, sit back and watch things happen. Either way, you’re going to see lots of things popping up or moving about, and you’re encouraged to interact and explore. You’ll see local news stories, web links, transit vehicles, live sports, neighbourhood profiles and even some big data visualizations.

We do not intend to be a neutral publisher. Data has become political in ways that impact all of us, every single day. It’s collected by many different organizations and fed into algorithms that are used to make decisions that impact real people, and the resulting panopticon is both hard to comprehend and impossible to escape.

The solution is to turn the lens back on the system, to help us all see both the forest and the trees. We are going to use technology and a little creativity to help all of us visualize complex systems, understand the news in context and hopefully have a lot of fun while we do it.

What you see here is the best way we’ve figured (so far) to show all that information to you. But please don’t rush to judgment just yet. We’re just getting started and will continue inventing new ways to look at our city for a long time to come.

Thanks, and see you around!

Chris Dinn (@chrisdinn)
Publisher
TORONTOVERSE
tovrs.ca