There is a flurry of new projects hitting the airwaves right now. Another interesting work comes from the team at Graphicacy who have been working with the The Center for American Progress to develop a videographic and interactive package to help bring visibility to the issue of the future of immigration in America and it’s impact on the economy. The project is titled ‘Our Future, Together‘.
The work commences with a short video graphic introducing the subject and framing the issue of the workers leaving the economy, those arriving and the influence immigrants and their future off-spring will have on helping to grow the economy.
Then, as you move down through the different sections, you learn more about that demographics of the current and future workforce. I really like this statement:
Just as explorers use a compass and architects a blueprint, demographers use pyramid charts to read the tea leaves: What groups are ageing or booming with youth, and what do these shapes tell us about the changing American workforce?
After the pyramid shapes of the current and future demographics, we have a tree map to compare and contrast the proportions of different ethnic groups.
Finally, we have two different portrayals of the data over time, looking at the emerging and likely trends of different generations of immigrants in the workforce and explore the ebb and flow of legal immigration via a stream graph.
As a side note, and taking a bigger picture view of the field, I wonder if this work and the Selfiecity project are representative of a developing theme of long-form visualisations. We’ve seen the boom of digital storytelling/long-form multimedia journalism (has anyone nailed a classification yet?) projects over the past 18 months (since Snow Fall) and I feel we are now seeing the influence on these multi-faceted, but specifically, visualisation projects. Time will tell I guess.
Anyway, you can learn more about this project here and for those nearby or attending, Jeff Osbourn (Creative Director) and Angeline Vuong (from CAP) will be giving a presentation about the project at the upcoming DC Interactive Documentary Summit.