Stories that inspire and data sets that support it
I’m interested in exploring the topic of human migration and how its influencing an increasingly globalized world. The reasons for human migration have begun to shift in recent decades as well as the protocols that surround them and the countries that are willing to host them. Political and tribal tensions have begun to increase nationalism across the world while at the same time technology and the internet continue to make us closer then ever before. I began looking at infographics that depict the current and former migratory patterns of people and have discovered that several designers are interested in this topic as well and have a pretty secure source for the data they use to depict their content.
Possible sources for reliable data that these designers have used and ones that I may be able to pull from most readily include The US Census and The World Bank which have been collecting data on this phenomenon for decades. The data they are using shows the number of people who are moving into or out of each respective country, however a weakness within this data is that it lacks any representation of the current migrant crises which doesn't count illegal border crossings, refugees or internally displaced people. I may be able to source some of this data through the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), annual reports and periodicals as well as other nonprofits dealing with refugees and undocumented migrants.
Great ideas @acercas. Not sure what format the UNHCR data you linked to (good figures, but baked in images/pdfs). Looks like you can download cool data from the visualization pages that you screencapped, like this one for the global flow of refugees...you can even copy the source code which is awesome:
I mentioned this in class but it might be cool to get data from Census Reporter which has prototype visualization and multiple export options that provide machine readable data in good formats. World bank data is also ace!