The thing that surprised me most about my project with Morgant Marant was not only the differences between the time periods of immigration in relation to history, but the unexplainable parts of immigration. Some of the reasons we found were that over time, a combination of the past and present events created a numeric value of how large or little the population increase became for that decade. 

Based on past data, the immigration trend seems as if it would decrease partially in the next two decades. Especially with the new presidency in the next year, laws may change drastically. That is, if the government can ever agree on anything. However, there will most likely always be a rate of increase or decrease with immigration. Even if we block of the border, it will take years to completely finish it. Some may propose that it will "create jobs and support the rise of the economy", but it will really only create a mass confusion of problems. The rate of immigration may then increase by rebellion. It has happened before, and there is no reason why it wouldn't happen again. 

The different decisions made on how do conduct the project were to make sure of a few key points: 

a) The project is visually appealing to the audience.
b) The images aren't too distracting to the overall message. 
c) With the images posted, there is some sort of explanation and way for it to be interactive. 

Therefore, using an online program called Vuvox, we created a timeline of photos. The size of the photos represents the rate of increase/decrease per decade. The decades are labeled above the pictures so that the audience can also visualize the different things that may have taken place during those periods. The pictures themselves are also representative of what happened in that time period. It's almost like watching a short movie. There is a sliding bar that allows a smooth transition between the decades. On each photo there is a small plus sign, and if clicked on, zooms in to the picture and the text shows up, revealing the different facts about that decade. 

The challenges of this project were finding a way that both Morgan and I could work on the project at the same time, finding pictures that fit the decade and expressing a clear explanation of how the decisions of the government clearly affect the rate of immigration. Also, it was a challenge to push for a further explanation of immigration. Sometimes, there were doubts as to why the changes happened the way they did. 

The things that I would change about the project if done over would probably have been to finalize all ideas and make sure every expectation was clear before assuming my partner knew. Even though we both had a similar idea, we had to do the project at least twice each. Once we combined our ideas, it was easy to see that it would be a success. I am happy with the final product, because it is very symbolic and clear to the audience. It isn't very hard to interpret, but it still challenges the audience to think while they look. 

Project --> http://www.flickr.com/photos/46333332@N03/6166605593/in/photostream


I think the thing that really surprised me was all the data before The Civil War. I knew about events before that time but as far as immigration goes, I didn't know a thing. What seemed sort of obvious to me as the huge decline in immigration during the time of The Great Depression. When I saw that I thought of back then and how it greatly difficult for people living here to find jobs, let alone someone how had immigrated. Yet, one thing I discovered that also impacted that great decline were the Quota Acts of the 1920s. These greatly limited and discriminated against nearly anyone trying to enter the U.S. My group at first wanted to try something with Prezi and we had something going but we found that we were taking too long to get something off the ground so we decided to go with a graphic instead. But as we were working on the graphic, I thought of using Minecraft to have a even better visual interpretation. But we soon realized that this was greatly time consuming and just stuck to our guns. I think the most challenging part was trying to incorporate the dates because sometimes, at least based on our research, the immigration had sort flatten out. If we had more time I'd would surely go for the minecraft idea, because I think that would have been a really creative way to display the data.

http://prezi.com/pdbkhd6dovfn/immigration-data/

All of this didn't surprise me much because I already knew most of this happened. What I didn't know was all of that could've effected immigration at some point. Because of the way our economy and current job status is I feel as though the immigration rate is only going to slow back down and start to decrease if things don't start to get better. Immigrants come over for jobs and that's what we are currently lacking the most. We kind of decided on it by what was going to represent our data the best. To me, the most challenging part was trying to get the final visual done and how the longer you wait to start your visual the more stressful it becomes when you finally start it. If I had to do anything different I would use my time better and spend less time on trying to find so much information but work with what I have and then do my visual as such. But overall it turned out to be good.