VizChitra 2025

Talk Description

What if we could visualize our individual migration patterns and discover similarities with others’ paths? Many of us have made decisions to move somewhere new--to a new neighborhood, city, or country. We might be “pushed” by a lack of opportunities where we are or social constraints, or we might be “pulled” by a dream of greater job prospects and financial savings, or simply a sense of adventure and something different. What we might not understand well is how similar, or different, these decisions are from those who came before us and from our peers who are running parallel tracks.

How can we use visualizations to help us look back on these migration decisions and compare them to other people’s paths? I have designed an interactive web tool that helps us explore our own migration paths, inspired by a previous effort which visualized successive waves of immigration at a macro scale.

Session Takeaways

Questions that participants will be able to explore by the end of the session may include:

• Where were you during the start of the Covid pandemic, and which of your friends were in the same city/country at the time?
• For how many successive years have you spent a religious holiday in a particular place?
• When your parents were your age, where were they? What were they working on?
• Is “home” the place where you have spent the most amount of cumulative time, or is it more complex than that?
• Which famous person is your migration track most similar to?
• Can you identify your “migration shadow”--that is, someone who closely matches your migration profile in terms of travels and career paths?

Participants will be able to build their own unique “migration print” and compare it to others in their immediate social circles, as well as to unrelated public individuals.

Given the complexity of migration as a topic for data visualization, this talk will also compare and contrast different methods for visualizing migration origins and destinations.

Audience

This talk is for anyone interested in:

• Stimulating conversations around their family histories and ancestries
• Understanding the multiple factors behind why people migrate
• Tracking where they’ve been year-on-year as they make New Year’s resolutions
• Disciplines: Public policy, tech for social good, etc.

About Me

I’m an entrepreneur, product designer, and former management consultant interested in urban development and informal economies. I’ve taught and given talks on cartography, AI, and data visualization. Details on my LinkedIn.