What surprised you most about this information?
-When doing the project with my group mates, I was surprised that there were many events that I never heard of that had such a huge impact on the immigration percentage. For example, in Germany, many people left the country and entered the United States because our soil was richer than Germany's. I never once thought that they would leave their own county for food, let done come to the United States.
What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
-The things that were most obvious were locating the dates and putting a pattern together. Every time the United States was in global conflict (wars), the immigration process slowed down because people were afraid of living in a country that was fighting a stronger power.
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.
-Presently, I know that the United States is more hard on immigrants. They now need proper documents to arrive and live in the country and if they don't, the United States doesn't give them a chance to earn the papers, it's just deportation. In the next two decades, I feel that it will get worse with immigration as we are now in a recession again. When more immigrants arrive, they might take jobs from US citizens causing no jobs and little money making process which will further increase our 14 trillion deficit in the economy.
Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
-At first I had an idea for my group to take clips from YouTube™ that showcased many of the events that affected immigration, but that became too tiresome as we only had 3 days to work on the project. We then switched to a 3D graph visualization.
What parts of group work were challenging?
-The dates I found challenging were finding accurate and major events that caused immigration or immigrants to leave the US. For instance, in the 1960's we entered the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I thought that would be major enough, but it was not accurate as the Cold War was 85% shielded by the government and anyone who knew of what happened int hose times denied the very fact of it taking place.
What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
-If I could redo this project over again I would create a movie using the clips from YouTube™ and make a moving graph that showcased the immigration change. Instead of a bar graph, I would create a line graph.
1. Post the link to your work as a new blog post on SLATE. Please add the TAG immviz1112 to the post.
2. With your blogpost, include your reflection related to:
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.
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.
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.
