Immigration Visualization Project

The link to the presentation can be accessed by clicking here. 

This project was fun to research, and fun to create a presentation for. The thing that surprised me most about this project was seeing how certain events made such a big impact on immigration. The single most surprising event was seeing how much impact the great depression had on the immigration to the United States. I would have guessed that it had some impact, but not as much as it actually did. Something that somewhat obvious was that since nothing as big as the great depression has happened in a while, the immigration would be rising at a rate close to what it should be. The only major things that have happened since the research left off was the war in Iraq, and our recession. These things will probably have some impact on immigration, but not as big as something like the great depression. If everything continues with nothing major happening for the next 20 years, then I think immigration will continue in the trend that it should. 

The most challenging part of this project was setting up the presentation. We got all of the data and information fairly quickly, but it was hard to set up the presentation tool that we wanted to use to represent our data. At first my group wanted to use a many-eyes tree chart, but it wasn't working out in the way that we wanted it to. After the tree chart didn't work we decided to do a sort of time line, showing how the number of immigrants increased depending on what the decade was, and if you click on each point you can see what the most important thing that effected immigration was. An example is that if you click on the 1930 point, the main thing is economy because our country was in a depression. 

If i was going to do this project over i would try to use a different presentation tool. The one that we used ended up working out, but it would be much better if we had spent all the time trying to use one too, doing something else with another tool or way to present. The presentation could have been much more creative than what it ended up being if we had more time to focus on the tool the we ended up actually using.