Our method
Charts that stay true.
Chixan publishes living charts — we call them choras — that redraw themselves the moment official data is released, and that are built to survive scrutiny from a professional economist. Here's how, and why you can trust the numbers.
What's a living chart?
Most charts are pictures: rendered once, then slowly going stale as the world moves on. A Chixan chart isn't a picture — it's a small, standing recipe bound to its data source. Five things make it what it is:
- 01
Source
Every chart is bound to a live feed from the issuing authority — Statistics Canada, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the BLS, the BEA — never a second-hand mirror.
- 02
Transform
The raw numbers are cleaned and computed the same way every time (year-over-year, indexed, seasonally adjusted) — reproducibly, not by hand.
- 03
Encoding
One consistent house style, with rules that ban the usual ways charts mislead (truncated axes, cherry-picked windows, misleading dual axes).
- 04
Freshness
When the source releases new data, the chart redraws itself. It is, by design, never more than one release out of date.
- 05
Provenance
Every chart carries its primary-source citation, the date it was retrieved, and the checks it passed before publishing.
The first four keep it current; the fifth makes it trustworthy — and the fifth is the whole point.
The promises
Primary sources only
We pull from the authority that issues the data, directly. Aggregators lag — one popular mirror showed Canada's policy rate ~2 years stale — so we don't rely on them. Every chart names its source and the date we retrieved it.
As fresh as the data allows
Daily series update daily; monthly ones on release day; annual figures when the year prints. We label the exact vintage ("data through …") so you always know how current a chart is — no pretending.
Like-for-like, or not at all
When we compare two countries, both series must measure the same thing — same definition, units, and base. If they can't be made truly comparable, we cut the chart rather than mislead.
Open to use
Chixan's own charts are CC BY 4.0 — free to embed and share with attribution. The embed stays live, so what you post never goes stale.
Who's behind it
Chixan is built and curated by a small team of economists and technologists. Trust in public data shouldn't require an institution — it should come from radical transparency: an open pipeline, primary-source citations on every chart, honest freshness labels, and a team accountable for the work. If we ever get something wrong, we correct it and say so.
142 living charts and counting · Canada & the United States