Conceptualizing and Constructing the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure

Abstract

The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, and internationally linked initiative to enable research on the making of modern Canada. At the heart of the CCRI are microdatabases centered on the manuscript census enumerations for 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941, and 1951. This research infrastructure will be added to the results of other projects that cover the periods from 1852 to 1901 and to the Statistics Canada (STC) census microdatabases from 1971 to 2001. When completed in 2008, the CCRI will thus enable research to be made on the individuals, families, households, and communities that experienced the complex transformations of Canada since the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing approaches to the epistemological issues involved in building the CCRI, the author seeks to advance scholarly debate by describing the research infrastructure’s distinguishing characteristics and explaining its various components that seek to both support and facilitate research projects. This overview provides the context for the three other articles in this theme issue of Historical Methods that focus on CCRI’s sampling and census microdata management strategies as well as the initiative’s georeferencing and contextual data systems.