Immigration Visualization Project




  • What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
    Many things surprised me based on the information my group and I researched. Before I researched the time periods I was given I came across alot of information I never knew before. I think it helped  alot with my knowledge of american history in general because within those time periods I gathered other information. Explaining this data wasn't difficult because the example graphs showed an more increases then downfalls with immigration.

  • Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
    Over the next two decades I feel that the immigration population is going to increase.  Only because the amount of immigrants increased since the early 2000s and america seems to provide alittle more then most countries give.

  • Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information. 
    My group and I finally can to a conclusion of how we wanted to successfully and thoughtfully present our information. We decided that Prezi would be the best choice for our information to be given.

  • What parts of group work were challenging?
     The challenging parts of my group work were the amount of information I could previde for a certain time period of my time line. It was difficult getting specific details of immigration.

  • What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
    Overall I feel my group and I provided enough information to provide the information the increases and decreases of immigration due to the historical events happening in each time period.

Immigration Visualization Project- Reflection



    • When finding out the history between the US and it's immigration, most things seemed to make sense besides one thing. The period between 1881-1890 (note: I realized that I made a mistake for this date on the project) . While it was a huge immigration boom during this period, I found the Chinese Exclusion Act was also established during this same decade. So, I'm still confused as to why the immigrant numbers increased so greatly. Some obvious increases and decreases were things like The Industrial Revolution, and The Great Depression (which are great points that show extreme disparities between immigrant numbers in the US history.) As for my prediction of the US numbers of Immigrants for the next two decades, I don't find that to be the easiest thing to predict. My reason for that is  because of the current economic state of the US, which is still in it's stages of pending effort to create more jobs, and to not add more to our deficit. Then again, we are still the most developed nation in the world, and I can imagine other millions of people wanting to come here for the opportunities as well. Not to mention, the number of immigrants that come would have to do with the nations that they are leaving from. The US would be flooded with immigrants if a nation perhaps has some sort of natural disaster, or fall in government. But overall, over the next two decades because the world is advancing more (could be in negative or positive ways) I could see 4 or 5 millions of people more than the previous decade coming over. As a group, we made our decision to to present the information similar to graph style but with a twist simply because of our inability to come up with something else more creative, but could also could be done within a certain span of time. But in the end, we decided to represent each decade as a building in a city and  the title of each building has historical significance to the events of the decade that affect US immigration numbers (it's on paper by the way). Some parts of the group that were challenging was really finding the time to work on it together besides in class. Also, we weren't always on the same page, or we always were. If I could do this project over, I would definitely go with one our first ideas because they would've been more visually appealing, albeit more time consuming.

Immigration Visualization Project

​What was surprising about the information I saw was how the immigration population went accordingly to the events that were taking place at the time in the United States. Also, it was surprising to see what caused each event to happen. If something went wrong, another thing would go wrong. Or, if something good happened, something good would follow along. What seemed quite obvious about the data set was, seeing as the events that occurred in the United States -varied from being good and bad- it affected the immigration population from increasing (when good) and decreasing (when bad). I predict that within the next 2 decades, the population of the US will decrease but also increase. Due to the recession:people being laid off, businesses shutting down, schools shutting down, etc. the population of immigrants will decrease. I believe that after the economy becomes more stabilized the population rate will return to its normality of increasing. My partner Brianna and I decided to use prezi because of its easy access. We kept it easy and simple; a timeline that included the events that occurred at the time and a picture. What was challenging of this group work project was researching and obtaining accurate information. When searching for a certain year and its events, I would find events of certain states rather than information of the United States. What I woud do differently if I could do this project over again is instead of using prezi's format, I would make a video. I really liked the video Ms. Laufenberg showed us, it was of a roller coaster (representing the ups and downs of the prices of houses.) I feel as if we didn't really have time to be more creative. But, I liked the results of my project.   

  

Immigration Visualization Reflection


Immigration

What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
It was interesting to realize that what happened during certain time periods either interested immigrants, or turned them away. It was pretty obvious that if there was more money and jobs available, that more people would want to take advantage of the opportunity. 

 
Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
I honestly feel that there could be and increase and a decrease in the immigration numbers for the next two decades. Due to the economy having it's many ups and downs, it could be hard for someone to move here and start a living. There's a lot of changes that are taking place that could be troubling for new citizens. However, I do believe that once everything is taken care of, agreed upon, and settled, the immigration numbers will increase. 


Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
My group first wanted to do something really creative, and something that everyone might not choose. We started making a book on the website Tikatok. We soon realized that it wasn't working for the assignment, so we then switched to using Prezi. 


What parts of group work were challenging?

We were all new to using Prezi, so we had to get used to using that. Other than that, I think we did a good job with organizing our time periods, and displaying our information that we gathered. We worked well, and worked diligently. 


What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
If I could do something differently, I would probably want to use more animations in Prezi. Our presentation basically goes from one time period to the next, but not much movement in between. So, maybe add more things to it. 

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

Immigration Link

The data set wasn't really surprising in the 19 hundreds because i already knew the major events that would push and pull people from immigrating. I would say that my time period 1820 -1880  i didn't know much , except like the civil war . It was quite interesting to find out how many epidemics happen and wars happened that America had no part in . I feel as though immigration will actually decrease because we don't really have much to offer anyone who does immigrate . Our economy is terrible , 14 million people are unemployed. I wouldn't come into such a quagmire , it could get better in the next 20 years but it could worsen . 
At first my group was going to do a story book , but then you clarified specially what you were looking for and the story book wasn't the right way to go . It had too many words and not enough visual. Then we decided to do a prezi because we liked the effects it offered and we had many ideas . So we decided to put our words on the immigration graph , when it is zoomed in you can see the events that lead to the amount. It was challenging to combine our work  and come up with an idea at first because jessica didn't know how to use a prezi and then we had to figure out every little detail. I would do more of a visual graph with pictures and more facts/research. 

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

For US History class we looked at two graphs that showed how population grows and how over the past last 190 years immigration to the United States has changed.  The first thing that was noticed was simply that these graphs were far from the same. The next thing was what could cause the strange and drastic changes in the immigration graph. Through research we found that these numbers were affected because of events, major ones were the Industrial Revolution, which caused a major increase in immigration and the Great Depression, which caused a major drop in immigration. One specific event thing I learned and was surprised about through this project was the Quota Acts. The Quota Acts were very strict laws limiting immigration from countries, some more limited than others. For instance during the Quota acts in 1924 where Chinese immigrants were limited to in the hundreds, German immigrations went into the hundred thousands. This made me realize how hand crafted the American population really is.

 

From what I’ve learned about history and immigration through this project I predict that the US immigration is close to a crash. I don’t know much about American economics but if we have another crash in the stock market and go into a depression it’s going to drop like it did before. Actually in fact when immigration hit the last peak it was at it crashed soon after, currently we are back up at the same numbers the previous peak were at, which to me signifies a soon drop. It will continue to go down for the next decade or so, and won’t start lifting up at least till the 2030’s.

 

The process for developing a product for this project was challenging. Our team Ryan Harris, Paige Wayman, and I hit a couple roadblocks in developing a good way of representing the data. At first we were going to make a Prezzi presentation but found that it was in fact fairly complicated to work with and decided it wasn’t the right type of visual representation we were aiming for. So instead we produced a map with arrows. The arrows size represents the amount if immigration that came from that part of the world. The color correlates with the color on the time line at the bottom. We found this to be a more eye-catching way of presenting the data. If we were going to do this project over I think we could have mixed the Prezzi and the map together. For example the events that we put on the map we could make little side notes that went off giving more information. Nothing was particularly challenging except building it. We all agreed on ideas and came together to work equally and cohesively.

Screen Shot 2011-09-20 at 8.55.06 AM
Screen Shot 2011-09-20 at 8.55.06 AM

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection


What surprised me the most about this information was that there was a lot of different reasons for the immigration rates throughout the years of American history. What's quite obvious was there were a lot of hardships in other countries causing them to flee to a better country that could provide money, jobs, and education which was America. Though there were problems within America itself there were not as much immigrants arriving but there were always some for each decade.

Many ups and downs occurred in the numbers of immigrants arriving to America, but there are also many push and pull factors. With our the recession currently going on in America the trend expresses that we may go down due to the recession, job cuts more than ever before.

My group and I had a difficult time of picking the best way to present our information visually. We eventually decided to do Prezi because it is an easy layout and very fun to do. The most difficult part of the group work was including all different pictures and everyones separate part of decades into one project. There is nothing I would like to change with my project because I am very happy with my final product.

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

Click here for our immigration project.

What surprised me most about the information my group found on immigration is just the overall trend of the immigration rate. I had no clue that the amount of people coming into the country was so inconsistent. By learning this information I feel more conscience about how the things that are going on around us effects everybody. However, it was obvious that during war the immigration rate would go down because America would want to keep a tighter leash on who can come in and out our country.

I feel like if the economy continues to worsen the immigration rate will go down. Either people will choose not to come to America or the government will be more strict about who's coming in.

As a group we decided that we wanted to create a graph similar to the one Ms. Laufenberg had given us, but instead we wanted it to be more visual. We chose to get pictures that best depicted the different circumstances that the world, more specifically America, was going through at the time. We feel like it gets the message across about what happened, and what the immigration rate was that decade in comparison to the years before and after. 

The most challenging part about the group work was the technology issues we had. For a period of time, several people in our group had tech related issues. This delayed the process slightly considering that most groups had 3 functioning computers to work on, and our group had one for a short period of time. It also harder to get work done when someone in the group doesn't participate or put in as much effort as the other members in the group. Aside from that the group work went pretty well.

If I were to do this project over I would probably try and find an even better way to represent the information that we found. I feel like the way we chose was pretty basic, and could have been a tad more creative. 

Immigration Visualization Project

What surprised me most about this information was that I didn't know how much history in and outside America determined the immigration rate. I always thought that the immigration was constant or gradually increasing with the new technology and "freedom" that were being put into Americans. What seemed quite obvious about the was that situations had to happen for their to be a tremendous growth and a tremendous increase in how many people were migrated/immigration from outer countries.
I believe that the immigration rates will stay the way it is for a few months. Simply for the fact because of the recent celebration of 9/11 and issues with the economy now.
Our decision for the project was to simply make a timeline with pictures, dates, and information. So it's easy for everyone to understand but also easy for us to teach the students.
The parts of group work that I found challenging was the research. A majority of the time when I was typed in a certain date or year to research something else in another continent would pop up such as Australia and Japan. Even though people were migrating from there, I was mainly researching about America.
What I would do differently if I had this project to do over and maybe look up for information about other countries. When I was researching the immigration rate I was looking at why people were coming to America instead of why were they leaving their home. But not just because America had jobs and money, but what was pushing them out of their home.

Immigration Visualization Project - Reflection

So, our project is on paper, we didn't have it digitally.

What surprised me the most during this project was that we were searching like the immigration rates during different decades and I realized that there were dramatic difference during the decades based on what happened on the decade before. If something bad happened in the Americas, the immigrated decreased like multiple times and when nothing bad or good happened, the immigration increased gradually so there weren't any trend or pattern on the data. Looking at the data, you'll understand why America's so diverse because there are people coming from all over the world every year.

So like I previously stated, our project is on paper. We decided to use paper because we were planning to create models on google sketchup or use technology to represent the data but we were running out of time. One thing that was challenging for our group work was that we didn't get to work together outside school because it was a paper and only one person could edit it. But we worked together on gathering information on google doc. If we were to do this project again, I'd use something like google presentation where everyone in our group can edit. However, at the end of the day, I'm proud of our work. 

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

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Screen Shot 2011-09-23 at 10.09.00 AM
​I thought the information was very interesting. The dip's the rises of the time periods were interesting. 

For our project we decided that we would make a picture of collage of all our times. Like, for the 2000's we showed a picture of the September 11th terrorist attacks. For the Chinese exclusion Act, we had pictures of Asians that looked distressed, so show what it did to them. 

i predict that the immigration rates will increase, because as our economy grows slowly so will our immigration rates will grow. But, if Barack Obama doesn't get reelected, than i think that our immigration will decrease, heavily. Since, Most of the people that come here are either Arab/LAtino, and his vote for Latino and arab were really high, the next president wont get that approval rate, so it will decline. I don't know if that's good or bad for the United States, because we don't really need a spike in Immigration because, we barely have enough to support the people here.


Honestly, to stay on task. Because, we're all Soccer players and we just usually talk about soccer all the time, so when we get together, it was hard for us to really work together without talking about other stuff, but i think it all came together in the end because we're all great students.


The one thing i'd do differently is use another presenting tool, the one we used is a pain in the but. `

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

The thing that surprised me most about my project with Morgant Marant was not only the differences between the time periods of immigration in relation to history, but the unexplainable parts of immigration. Some of the reasons we found were that over time, a combination of the past and present events created a numeric value of how large or little the population increase became for that decade. 

Based on past data, the immigration trend seems as if it would decrease partially in the next two decades. Especially with the new presidency in the next year, laws may change drastically. That is, if the government can ever agree on anything. However, there will most likely always be a rate of increase or decrease with immigration. Even if we block of the border, it will take years to completely finish it. Some may propose that it will "create jobs and support the rise of the economy", but it will really only create a mass confusion of problems. The rate of immigration may then increase by rebellion. It has happened before, and there is no reason why it wouldn't happen again. 

The different decisions made on how do conduct the project were to make sure of a few key points: 

a) The project is visually appealing to the audience.
b) The images aren't too distracting to the overall message. 
c) With the images posted, there is some sort of explanation and way for it to be interactive. 

Therefore, using an online program called Vuvox, we created a timeline of photos. The size of the photos represents the rate of increase/decrease per decade. The decades are labeled above the pictures so that the audience can also visualize the different things that may have taken place during those periods. The pictures themselves are also representative of what happened in that time period. It's almost like watching a short movie. There is a sliding bar that allows a smooth transition between the decades. On each photo there is a small plus sign, and if clicked on, zooms in to the picture and the text shows up, revealing the different facts about that decade. 

The challenges of this project were finding a way that both Morgan and I could work on the project at the same time, finding pictures that fit the decade and expressing a clear explanation of how the decisions of the government clearly affect the rate of immigration. Also, it was a challenge to push for a further explanation of immigration. Sometimes, there were doubts as to why the changes happened the way they did. 

The things that I would change about the project if done over would probably have been to finalize all ideas and make sure every expectation was clear before assuming my partner knew. Even though we both had a similar idea, we had to do the project at least twice each. Once we combined our ideas, it was easy to see that it would be a success. I am happy with the final product, because it is very symbolic and clear to the audience. It isn't very hard to interpret, but it still challenges the audience to think while they look. 




Immigration Visualization Project

Honestly, I was quite surprised to see the current placement with immigration on the graph. I feel honored to live in such a "drastic" period in history. The last spike in immigration happened quite a while ago. But now, I can see that in my generation, immigration has been the highest it's ever been. But after looking at the graph, I noticed that it's not very linear. In other words, it doesn't have one set increasing rate. It doesn't increase by a certain amount every decade. It's very sporadic, and for some reason, I kind of expected that. 

In history, you can't really predict how things would go. The great depression would have never happened if people knew it was going to. So therefore, it's truly hard to determine how things will be for our future. There are a multitude of options. For example, the United State's economic position right now is... terrible. I don't know how things were during the great depression, but I'm sure it wasn't good. And look how fast that happened. If something happened to America, it could possibly spark another very serious economic predicament. So that means we can go from the highest immigration number EVER, to possibly the lowest. Or, maybe by some unusual coincidence, congress passes some new immigration law that brings more people to the United States without as much difficulty prior. Then instead of nine million, it sparks to eleven million. It's impossible to determine how things could turn out. Next year is 2012 after all, who knows if we'll even be here! (Kidding). 

In our project, similar to a bar graph, we hand-drew a city that's building's sizes vary depending on how the amount of immigration during that decade. And I feel it was interpreted fairly well. You can see some buildings nearly come off the page because of how many people immigrated to the US, whereas you'd need a magnifying glass to see the buildings during the late 1800's. (Exaggeration, you can see it without a magnifying glass). Then each building's name was determined by something that happened in that time period. The larger buildings were from the early 1900's because of war and from this decade. Whereas the "Great Depression" building is only about a centimeter because of the low amounts of immigration. 


In general, the way we wanted to present the information was the hardest difficulty. We had so many awesome, creative ideas. But after realizing that we had almost 20 decades to cover, we came to a loss. Then the idea of a "populated city" came into the discussion, which made a lot of sense. The more people = the larger the city. So I feel it was an effective way of transferring the information in a spiffy little way. After we decided on how to present, it was smooth sailing from there. 

I believe the way we did the project this time was very well. If WE had the opportunity to change something about next time, the amount of decades was rather difficult in portraying in a unique way. If it was a lower amount, I feel one of our prior ideas to the city could have been better. But explaining 20 decades was a little more challenging. Though, you can't leave out important dates in history. So I suppose we'll just have to stay content with our city.

 




Immigration Visualization Project

http://www.vuvox.com/my_vox/show/0491fb777a 

The immigration visualization project had some data that was somewhat surprising and others that I thought was a bit predictable. For example, the fact that immigration was so conjoined with our history was not surprising. Even though there should have been a gradual curve in development social implications can always change a graph. It makes perfect sense that during the 1940's there was a huge drop in immigration into the United States, which was predominately caused by World War II. What surprised me the most about the data was that certain parts of the world had more leeway into our country then others. In the next two decades, I'd like to presume that immigration has dropped in our country due to our bad economy and how hard it is to find jobs now. 

If the economy can be fixed and make us a prosperous country once again, then we will have another huge influx of immigrants and we will be back to the gradual curve. The gradual curve, created an interesting phenomena in comparing that to the actua data. So, when my group made the decision to work together we came together with ideas. We wanted to visually represent the data in a way that was quick and straightforward. We used an online presentation tool called VUVOX. One of the presentation themes in VUVOX is making collages. Our group decided to create a timeline of the information through visual representations of each decade. The bigger the picture the higher the immigration during that decade. 

That course of action seemed the simplest to us and was very useful. Unfortunately, VUVOX is a website so saving work online was a challenge. During the creation of my collage piece it was deleted, or not saved and I had to start all over again. Also, I may have not been extremely explicit in the instructions and my parter and I had two different ideas of what we would be doing. If I could fix my mistakes and begin this project again I would choose some better photos and possibly have  key. The key could describe what was going on in the government or immigration because I have the historical facts but not the ones on immigration. I would also incorporate better pictures or visual representations of what's going on within that time period and within history. I would also include a personal account of a person's journey to America as the audio just so it would add more depth to the story.

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

Immigration
What surprised me most about this information was how drastically the happenings in both the US and other countries could affect the immigration rate. The things that were really obvious when explaining the data set were when there were wars in different countries, the immigration rates shot up and when the US was involved in the war, they usually went down and also when there were famines or other things that obviously negatively affected the people in a different country, the immigration rates would shoot up again. In the next two decades I expect the immigration rates to be lower because of the economical situation and how easily the situation can be displayed on websites that are very popular. If people in other countries can see that we're going through an economical crisis they will also be able to see how high the unemployment rate is and how many different governmental budget cuts we are going through and they might not want to come to a country going through such hardship. 

At first we were going to do a storybook type thing, but then when the instructions were clarified and we saw we had to display the events and the data, we decided to do a prezi because we could show the overall graph and put more detailed information inside it. The most challenging parts of the group work were finding a way to collaborate on the different websites. Some sites only allowed one person to work on it, so instead of all of us working on it together, at the same time, we had to take it in shifts. On prezi we had found a way to collaborate, but it took us some time to get used to it. I think if I had to do this project over, I would find a way to make it more creative or colorful or something. To me, it's a bit dry, but it's informative. We wanted to add pictures and maybe video to it, but we were short on time.

Immigration Visualization Project


Click here to view project



This project was interesting, and allowed me to look into the past and see why there was maybe so many immigrants that came over during that year. I was most surprised at how dramatically the number of immigrants that came over during the wars decreased as fast as they did. Over the next few years I feel like immigration numbers will continue to climb rapidly. With the world's economy collapsing as a whole, the United States as bad as it is is still one of the best economies in the world. With things falling apart i feel like more people will want to come here. Immigration will continue to climb for several decades. 

Finding a good way to represent the data that we had received was a little difficult. We ran into a few difficulties along the way, and we eventually found a good way to represent the data thanks to Ms. Laufenberg. She helped us find a correct format that would allow us to show our data correctly. The method in which our data was displayed was in a scatter chart, representing the decades and number of immigrants per decade.               


The only part of the project that we found to be challenging was what s. Laufenberg helped us with and that was finding the right graph format that would allow us to represent the data correctly. We all got our data that we needed as soon as we needed it and worked diligently. Also, if we were to do something differently we might have chose a different site to look for graphs to represent the data this was we might not run into the complications that we ran into while we worked on it. 






Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

Project --> http://www.flickr.com/photos/46333332@N03/6166605593/in/photostream


I think the thing that really surprised me was all the data before The Civil War. I knew about events before that time but as far as immigration goes, I didn't know a thing. What seemed sort of obvious to me as the huge decline in immigration during the time of The Great Depression. When I saw that I thought of back then and how it greatly difficult for people living here to find jobs, let alone someone how had immigrated. Yet, one thing I discovered that also impacted that great decline were the Quota Acts of the 1920s. These greatly limited and discriminated against nearly anyone trying to enter the U.S. My group at first wanted to try something with Prezi and we had something going but we found that we were taking too long to get something off the ground so we decided to go with a graphic instead. But as we were working on the graphic, I thought of using Minecraft to have a even better visual interpretation. But we soon realized that this was greatly time consuming and just stuck to our guns. I think the most challenging part was trying to incorporate the dates because sometimes, at least based on our research, the immigration had sort flatten out. If we had more time I'd would surely go for the minecraft idea, because I think that would have been a really creative way to display the data.

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection


http://prezi.com/pdbkhd6dovfn/immigration-data/

All of this didn't surprise me much because I already knew most of this happened. What I didn't know was all of that could've effected immigration at some point. Because of the way our economy and current job status is I feel as though the immigration rate is only going to slow back down and start to decrease if things don't start to get better. Immigrants come over for jobs and that's what we are currently lacking the most. We kind of decided on it by what was going to represent our data the best. To me, the most challenging part was trying to get the final visual done and how the longer you wait to start your visual the more stressful it becomes when you finally start it. If I had to do anything different I would use my time better and spend less time on trying to find so much information but work with what I have and then do my visual as such. But overall it turned out to be good.

Immigration Visualization Project

Immigration in America
Immigration in America
What surprised me most about this information is that even when the immigration rate was very iffy and varied. The population had a smooth increase and was constant. In our visual, you can see the red line (immigration throughout the years) and how it's zig-zagging all over the place. The only thing that seems pretty obvious at explaining was WHY the immigration rate was so crazy. The events and history is the key to understanding the population. My group decided to visually present the information like a swirl chart. A swirl of years and images of what went on during those years was shown and the history was presented. The first black line is like showing how smooth the population is and how the immigration (red line) was very crazy. 

The challenging part with working in a group was that it didn't seem like enough work to distribute out to three people. The researching of the dates and events was evenly distributed, but when it came to showing the visual part of the project, it didn't seem like enough. If I had to do this project over, I think my group and I would make it a priority to include more and some phrases here and there. There's a lot someone can understand by looking at the photo, but if they don't know exactly what even occurred in what time frame, they'll stare blankly at the photo. 

Group Members: Maximilien Marton and Jennifer Wright 

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. 
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Screen Shot 2011-09-23 at 10.16.55 AM

Immigration Visualization Project

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Screen Shot 2011-09-23 at 10.16.09 AM
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Reflection.

It was kind of challenging to figure out what kind of project we wanted to do. It was also challenging dividing the work all at once. But I really enjoyed the process of the project. We took a risk and we don't know for sure how the risk will fair out. But I really liked the communication of it though. We might do and easier project differently maybe because this one actually took a long time to do. We also wanted to do a video but that didn't really work out well. I think the immigration is really unstable. Since during the great depression there was really no immigrants coming in I think during the recession we would start to lose because there will be no jobs and no money. So there would be no reason for them to come here. But since immigrants keep coming in maybe because of the American dream and just being america makes people come here. Thats how my friend came here.

Immigration Visualization Project Reflection

​The huge spikes that occurred surprised me most about that data. I thought the immigration due to wars in other countries was obvious. Many people flock to the US for safety. Looking at the data, I see highs and then low-lows. It seems that in 1999-2000 there was a very high percentage of immigration. I would predict that that number is likely to drop for this current decade and the next. The US isn't in a very good spot economically and that would definitely factor into the amount of people attempting to gain access to America.  That same idea can be seen within the data. When the US was doing well everyone wanted in. 

My group wanted to represent that data in a really creative way. We wanted to do something outside of the normal bar or pie chart. When Ms. Laufenberg showed us a bunch of cool visual graphs my group all like the spiral type one. Ours is a simpler version but with the same concepts. It has pictures to describe the major events and uses the red line to signify the amount of immigration per decade. It is very visual rather than numerical. 

The challenging part of this project was sharing the work. It was one piece that three people needed to work on it. Distributing the tasks evenly was difficult. If I had to do this project over, I would choose a different format. My group tried to do something interesting and it worked relatively well, but it the distribution of work was the hard part. We gathered the info and developed the concept together but the actual construction had to be one person. 
Immigration in America
Immigration in America

Immigration Visualization Project

I think overall this was a good project.  When we began to look through history and see what happened it became clear what influenced the immigration rates. A lot of it was due to wars and military action. That was really interesting to me. The challenging part was coming together to create a visualization of our data. I think if we had to do this project over again, we would have used a different program to create our visualization. Although ManyEyes was cool, it was frustrating over 90% of the time. Often we would be stuck reformatting our data and re-entering it into ManyEyes. Because we were so set on using the treemap, we didn't think of trying something else. After we realized that this wasn't working out, we tried a bunch of other formats until Ms. Laufenberg showed us the scatterplot thing. That worked the best so we stuck with it.


​For the full interactive version, click here:

 
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/wjohnsonsla-us-history-immigration
Screen Shot 2011-09-23 at 10.17.05 AM
Screen Shot 2011-09-23 at 10.17.05 AM

Immigration Visualization Project

Immigration in America
Immigration in America
When first exposed to the immigration statistics, I took note on how drastic the different change in numbers were. As observed the information further, I connected the different highs and lows of the numbers to different points in history that I was previously aware of. I cannot say that the statistics took me completely by surprise, but neither can I say that one point didn't intrigue me. In the timeframe where the Gilded Age was at its height, the immigration numbers were't as high as I pictured them.

Predicting the future immigration statistics is perplexing. On one hand, the United States is currently in a time of economic tension, which I believe would repel immigrants. On the other, immigrants today from many countries in Europe are trying to escape their own nation's economic problems that are worse than the situation in America. One prediction I feel confident about, is that there will be many immigrants from countries like Greece and several North African nations. I do not know if our immigration numbers will follow the same increasing trend.

My group and I wanted to create a timeline of sorts, but we didn't want a normal, horizontal/vertical type of graphic. We decided to use a spiral, because it is a visually captivating figure. We then added several pictures that represented different points in time that effected immigration. The most challenging tasks in creating our piece had to have been using Adobe Illustrator and marrying physical media with digital media. Finding a scanner was a laborious task as well...
If given the chance to recreate my group's final project, I would like to do all of it in Adobe Illustrator. I feel it would look more streamline that way. I would have also added more information, as well as a y axis so that people would be able to actually get numbers from this visual.

Immigration Visualization Project

Kamilah's Reflection

So first of all, the project that me and my group did was by hand and so there is no kind of link or anything to post on the blog but you can see it at anytime by just going to see Lauf about it.

  • What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
So when we first starting doing this experiment I found that the data was extremely surprising to me. I would have never thought that the immigration income had varied the way that it did. I found it funny that there seemed to be a pattern to the data though. It was like America realized that the immigration was becoming a problem so they tried to control it but no matter what they tried, when people wanted to get into the country, the did.
At first i wasn't really sure of why the data looked the way it did but after looking up the facts about each time period, things started to make since. Some were slightly funny as well. There was one where alcohol becamed banned and there was a significant decrease in the population of immigrant income.
  • Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
The data shows that when the country is going through a hard time, no one really wants to come in. From the data and background research that we did as a group it seems as if immigrants only take an interest in our country when we're flourishing and prospering. Right now though our country is on a fine line between okay and consumed in a depression. I think that the immigrant income isn't going to increase or decrease because right now our country is at a stand still money wise. There's gonna be a pretty constant flow i think for a while until we either get worse or better as a country.
  • Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
At first we were going to use prezi but then things got too bothersome on the site. Then while trying to find a new way to present the idea, I got an idea oh how I wanted to visually present it. It would look beautiful digitized but no one in my group had the tech skillz to make the vision we agreed on. There for in the end we decided to hand make it.
  • What parts of group work were challenging?
I think making the visual presentation was the hardest part because it took a lot of effort and thought. We had to make sure that the data was presented effectively but not boring.
  • What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
If I had done this project over I think I would firstly do it myself. Then I think I would have made the art work a lot more neater and detailed. Because I was working with partners who really don't have drawing skills I had to make sure that the artwork in the project was simple enough for them to mimic so that I didn't have to do it all by myself.