American Migration

American Migration Interactive Map

American Migration is an interactive United States map, that visualize the migration from county to county from the year 2005 to 2010.

To use/interact with the application

Go to About!

About Section

Initial Screen

The initial screen is grayed out, and tells the user to click on any county. The user can also enter a county or major city via prompt. On the top right of the map there is a Year selection from 2005 to 2010.

Colormap with lines Selection without lines

When you select the first county, two colors on the county will populate, and line colors. The red counties mean they took more migration than they sent out, and blue counties mean they sent more migration than they took. The counties are also having different shades/ opacity of red or blue depending on how many migrated in or out.

The second image is a selection without the lines, this is easier to see has the lines overlaps the map near the selected county It can been seen that there are more red counties then blue, but its hard to pinpoint by how much the difference is between outbound and inbound.

Year Label Screen

The year bar graph does more justice to the interactive; it shows if the county has more people coming in or going out, also how it is doing in the following years. You can see that there is more outbound starting at year 2005, and is decreasing has the year passes. The barchart is dynamic per county selection.

Koochiching Koochiching Chart

KooochtoStLouis KoochtoHenn

The application has more information for colored county by hovering after you selecting the county. For this example I picked a small county (Koochiching County, Minn) that has very few migration. You can see how many people migrated to and from, and income per capita. This shows if there is a difference in capita when migrating

Comment Section

The American Migration is easy to use and at first glance might be hard to understand. The initial gray map doesn’t overload the user with data. After reading the data shown, you understand it better what it means. I understand that lines make it easy to see where migration is happening but it feels overwhelming when a popular county is picked like cook, and doesn’t help much. It also hard to see the surrounding it. The two colors are good selection, and it also have opacity on the map, which makes it easier to see the solid colors, as majority of people are going or coming. There is no scale on the opacity, which would be nice feature. I wish you could zoom the map, since the map was very small. Some of the county were hard to select. Having able to enter the county or city manually via textbox was a good choice, because I wanted to find more info about a city but didnt know where it was

Some uses of this application can be seeing where people are migrating after a technology boom, or financial crisis such as Detriot bailout. This year label makes it easier to see if they are migrating to or from and how many. The app does ask question how they are migrating, but not why. The bar graphs is dynamic as you select different county. I wish there was a timeline of US events, such as bailouts, you can see that people are leaving Detriot, but why are they leaving? Someone who has no knowledge about US history will have a hard time figuring out the true meaning of the American Migration.

The data source is the IRS data from the year 2005 to 2010. The data should be updated to the current year. Each year starts on tax April and ends on April next year. There is no link to the data source. The data only includes people represented as exception on income tax return.So people who missed the tax return might not be in here. If the county had less than 10 people that migrated then it wont show on the map