Using open data to visualize global flow of people

A screenshot illustrating where immigrants to Guatemala originated, from peoplemov.in.

Almost 216 million people, or 3.15% of the world’s population, live outside their countries according to the peoplemovin website. It’s an experimental project that takes open data of human migration and population statistics, and combines them to visualize the movement of people from country to country.

The movement of people from each country is represented by what the creator identifies as a slopegraph, a way of charting data by visualizing the rate of change and subsequent relationship changes of a series of entities using a single data variable.

The peoplemovin chart is split into two columns, with emigration countries on the left and destination countries on the right. When you click on one of the filaments, such as the country of Andorra in the left-hand column, a string of lines appears that connects to various destination countries on the right-hand column. The thickness of the line represents the immigrated people.

Peoplemovin combines multiple data sources. This includes the World Bank’s open data for migration information, the Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011 for refugee and asylum data, and the US Census Bureau, International Data Base for world population information. It would be interesting to see the effect on peoplemovin’s migration results if additional data sources, such as those from the United Nations, were added.

According to the website, the top migrant destinations are the US, Russian Federation, and Germany. Top migration corridors are from Mexico to the US, the Russian Federation to Ukraine, and Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

Information designer Carlo Zapponi, based in London, UK, said that he created the website on the HTML5 toolkit for flow charts and invites visitors to sift through the source code of peoplemovin if they’re more curious.