An Interactive Map of American Migration | Hacker News Reader

An Interactive Map of American Migration

forbes.com

26 pointsmshafrir5 comments

It's shocking to compare my county which shows up as a hard to click speck on that map with some in the mid west.

  Sioux County (Fort Yates), N.D.Population (2010): 4,153
  Population (2005): 4,084
  Inbound income per cap. (2009): $8,800
  Outbound income per cap. (2009): $13,400
  Non-migrant income per cap. (2009): $11,000
  Edit: Area: 1,094 sq mi, Density 3/sq mile

  Arlington County (Arlington), Va.Population (2010): 207,627
  Population (2005): 187,760 
  Inbound income per cap. (2009): $44,900
  Outbound income per cap. (2009): $49,500
  Non-migrant income per cap. (2009): $59,000
  Edit: Area: 26 sq mi, Density 7,995/sq mi

PS: Of that 26 sq mi the federal government owns 4.6 square miles (11.9 km2) much of which is Arlington Cemetery which means population density on private land is close to 10,000/sq mile.

Nice. It would be very interesting to correlate the migration with unemployment. The outliers (eg: bad economy but migration influx) would be even more interesting.

By the way, I did something similar for scientific collaboration between Metropolitan Statistical Areas: http://olihb.com/?p=140

This is cool, but only slightly useful. The problem is that for major metropolitan areas(like Harris County) you may see an almost equal income and outgoing, but if you look at the map you see that almost all of the outgoing was to the 6 surrounding counties.

The lines on this map provide almost no additional information at all, and make it almost completely unusable for counties with high turnover (e.g., San Diego).

...At least they can be turned off, but why bother?

Hello--

I'm the author of the map. I meant for the lines to introduce the form of the map: that when you click on a county, you see connections between that county and other counties. You can always explain that in the text above the map, but most users don't bother to read the text, so in some informal trials without lines lots of users misinterpreted what they were seeing.

The lines also give the map a sort of immediate visual punch--especially when the map is shared via a static screenshot, which lots of users have done.

I figured lots of users would turn off the lines pretty quickly, since they obscure nearby pairings, and the analytics suggest that a substantial number of users do switch the lines off.

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