MigrationViz

Introduction

Exploring the Human Journey: Visualizing Global Migration

Welcome to Migration Viz, our interactive visualization project, where we delve into the complex patterns of global human migration. As the saying tells us : A picture is worth more than a thousand words. That may be even truer when the visualization is interactive!

Our work is driven by the recognition that behind every statistic, there's a human story - a narrative of hope, struggle, and resilience. We want to bring our contribution to bridge the gap between the depersonalized data often encountered when addressing the subject of migration and the individual experiences that data represents.

The public scene is often polarized and emotionally charged around the subject of migration. Better knowledge of migrations flows, statistics, etc. can add value to the discussions on migration in our society and our perception of the subject.

Prepared with love and work by the Authors, based on external work. See Credits.

Sankey

Have you ever realized what is the scope of migration at a global scale ? In the wake of a globalized world, human displacement reaches proportions never-before attained. Migration can be time-restricted (for studies, for work) or life-long, voluntereed but also forced.

Reasons behind those choices can be economical, political, but also only a question of survival. Investigate how numbers of people changing of country of origin varies over time continent by continent by interacting with the Sankey diagram on the right.

UNDESA

Did you know that there are more than 3x as many refugees in the Near Middle East than in Europe? Don't hesitate to explore differences between individual countries such as in the Middle East or between mainland (for ex. France) and oversee departements (ex: Reunion) by hovering over the map. The tooltip shows information of the closest country, allowing also for small countries to be explored.

United

“Girl, 7, dies after boat capsizes near Dunkirk in France”

Does this headline sound familiar ? Consistently reading and hearing similar headlines impacts how we pay attention to the tragedy that is taking place since 1993: over 50'000 people have lost their lives trying to reach European countries .

Each of the "data points" in the visualization below represents at least one person who has died when trying to seek asylum in Europe. We invite you to look at the indididual stories.

The public scene is often polarized and emotionally charged around the subject of migration. This last visualization aims to unveil the order of magnitude of migrant deaths at the doors of Europe, without overlooking the fact that each tragedy involves real people, with a family, hopes, dreams, and lives.

⚠ Warning: The next slide will contain information about deaths of migrants ⚠

Info Panel

Here, you receive additional information on the event.

You can zoom in and out of the map as you wish. The points represent deadly events on the border and inside of Europe.

Choose the timeperiod you are interested in.

Authors

Lola Bardel (SV)

Nicolas Filimonov (SV)

Stefanie Helfenstein (SIE)

Casimir Nüsperling (SV)

Credits

The website was coded using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the visualizations rely on the D3.js library. Our first two visualizations Sankey and UNDESA are based on data made available to the public by the United Nations departement of Economic and Social Affairs. It is thanks to the tremendous work realized by the Europenan network UNITED that we are able to produce the United visualization.

We would like to credit the work previously done that we used or where inspired by. Malcolm Maclean gave us the key to design simple Sankey diagrams and we can only recommend his manual "Tips and Tricks for D3.js". We used the hand-drawn open-source illustration library Open Peeps designed by Pablo Stanley. The welcome page animation was taken from the code chunk of Szenia Zadvornykh. The projections of the map of United required World data. For country centroid positions we got data from the Github repository of komsitr komsitr. The code for the colored legend of the UNDESA map was taken from Mike Bostock's code on Observable. The flags for the UNDESA map were taken from Flagpack.

We hope you enjoyed our website and gained new perspectives on the topic of migration. If you are interested in further information on the topic, we recommend having a look at the Atlas des migrations dans le monde