In previous reflections, I have tried to find interesting visualizations from across the internet, but they haven't
been recent. For this week I tried to find something that was just recently published to see if I could
get an idea of what data visualizations are expected to look like right now. Through some searching, I arrived
at a law office webpage, interestingly enough, that had partnered with a data visualization team "1Point21 Interactive"
to create a visualization of immigration trends in the united states based on where the current population was
born.
The visualization I want to focus on covers each state individually to show trends in global as well as interstate
immigration. Personally, it wasn't immediately obvious why the states were ordered how they were until I took
a step back and realized that their position roughly correlates with their geographical location. Moving these
charts around according to state position helps visualize some trends very nicely. For instance,
For the oldest states, you can see how those at the top right of the country have always had a strong base of people
who were born in that state since it was well established before 1850. But, you can tell how states on the west
coast of the country have experienced large migrations of Americans in the past. It also shows how immigrants
from other countries view potential states. You can see that throughout history only really states on the
coast (excluding the Gulf of Mexico) or the northern border have seen significant numbers of people born outside
The US. This makes sense because if I were coming to the US, there isn't much reason to move to the middle of the
country where there are pretty much just farms. The other interesting detail about the location of each state graph
is because AK and HI are separated geographically they can serve as a key, just like how AK is used in
this example. This is very creative and probably the coolest aspect of arranging the states graphs
in this manner.
There's another graph that combines all of the states into one larger graph which is nice but it's not
as interesting as the final graph showing immigration from outside the US. The graph is scaled by percentage
over time and by ordering countries/continents by percentage, you can easily see at a glance when any
particular area sent more people to the United States than any other in a specific decade. The fade of
the data from Europe to a more global spread is also very beautiful, even without the data to
analyze it is a very pleasing graph to look at.
