Abstract
Abstract. Human migration has been an important activity in human societies since antiquity. Since 1890, approximately three percent of the world’s population has lived outside of their country of origin. As globalization intensifies in the modern era, human migration persists even as governments seek to more stringently regulate flows. Understanding this phenomenon, its causes, processes and impacts often starts from measuring and visualizing its spatiotemporal patterns. This study builds a generic online platform for users to interactively visualize human migration through space and time. This entails quickly ingesting human migration data in plain text or tabular format; matching the records with pre-established geographic features such as administrative polygons; symbolizing the migration flow by circular arcs of varying color and weight based on the flow attributes; connecting the centroids of the origin and destination polygons; and allowing the user to select either an origin or a destination feature to display all flows in or out of that feature through time. The method was first developed using ArcGIS Server for world-wide cross-country migration, and later applied to visualizing domestic migration patterns within China between provinces, and between states in the United States, all through multiple years. The technical challenges of this study include simplifying the shapes of features to enhance user interaction, rendering performance and application scalability; enabling the temporal renderers to provide time-based rendering of features and the flow among them; and developing a responsive web design (RWD) application to provide an optimal viewing experience. The platform is available online for the public to use, and the methodology is easily adoptable to visualizing any flow, not only human migration but also the flow of goods, capital, disease, ideology, etc., between multiple origins and destinations across space and time.
Highlights
Mapping the movement of people worldwide resembles historic attempts to capture the movement of water in the world’s great oceans and seas
The authors selected a grey background of polygon outlines as the base map. This can be replaced by other thematic maps of the choice if the user so desires, the original base map is designed to highlight the human migration streams with a dramatic visual effect
When the platform is adopted for visualizing other datasets, especially new types of flows or connections other than human migration, there will inevitably be a need for modifications on the cartographic design of the system to enhance visualization effects for the chosen theme
Summary
Mapping the movement of people worldwide resembles historic attempts to capture the movement of water in the world’s great oceans and seas. Just as charting currents fostered a grasp of shifting waters and improved the navigation of ships as early as the 16th Century, mapping human migration can promote a more systematic understanding of human movement This understanding is desperately needed to inform the management of an everglobalizing world. The objective of this study is to build a map-centric visualization tool that is able to take in simple input data formats and quickly render the migration flow through space and time, with an easy-to-access and user-friendly interface. Such a platform contributes to the study of human migration at any geographic and temporal scale, and lays the foundation for an even more generic platform to visualize the movement of any object in space and time, such as the flow of goods, capital, disease, ideology, etc., and provides a starting point for building a more comprehensive analytical platform to examine causes and consequences of such migrations
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