• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
  Among the things that surprised me the most were the dramatic decreases that the data showed in certain decades of US History. However, once I considered the decades with the decreases and the different events happening in America at the time, they made perfect sense.
  
  Also, one thing that really intrigued me was how the overall American population had a nearly linear, steady increase, where as the immigration arrivals often changed.
  
  
  
• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
  I believe that the immigration trend in the US will suffer a slight decrease, due to the dissolution of the American economy. I believe that these problems in the federal government will not attract people from foreign countries to inhabit the US.
  
  
  
• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
  We decided to place emphasis on the push/pull factors that encouraged immigration.  We decided that each decade had multiple perspectives, and so we wanted to display that in our visual piece.
  
  
  
• What parts of group work were challenging?
  I think everyone in the group had a massive amount of ideas, and it was very hard to compress those ideas into a singular image.
  
  
  
• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  If we had more time, I would include photos in the decades as well. I feel that this would have really solidified the multiple perspectives that we were trying to convey.

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
  The thing that surprised me most about the data was the general numbers of immigrants. The great depression was literally one of the most depressing times in America and all though there was a severe decrease in immigrants there were still a large amount. It was obvious that in times of war, over seas especially, there would be an increase in people trying to escape from the war zone. 
  
  
• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
  I think the immigration numbers would continue to rise and may have some points from 2000-to present where it decreases because of the economic inflation. I do not think that it would cause a severe drop but it would be a noticeable one. 
  
  
• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
  Originally my group created a very boring slide show, which we soon fixed to a single image. I had originally wanted to do something basic and even elementary because with things like history sometimes it doesn't hurt to simplify the information so that all people , really uninformed to experts, would understand. I liked the idea of child like smiley faces because if I was the audience it would appeal to me.
  
  
• What parts of group work were challenging?
  I think as a group we could've did a better job splitting up the work because with both versions of the presentation someone was left doing 90% of the work. I do think, however, that it was more efficient to work like that in this instance because doing separate things and trying to incorporate it all into one simple photo would have been difficult in the amount of time we had. Although, we did all have a say in what the image should include and how we could represent it. Original ideas were shared by everyone equally. 
  
   
• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  I would probably want to make the presentation something a little bit more animate and interactive and somehow portray why the numbers dropped a bit better. 

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?

• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.

• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.

• What parts of group work were challenging?

• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  

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What surprised you most about this information?  

-When doing the project with my group mates, I was surprised that there were many events that I never heard of that had such a huge impact on the immigration percentage. For example, in Germany, many people left the country and entered the United States because our soil was richer than Germany's. I never once thought that they would leave their own county for food, let done come to the United States. 

What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?

-The things that were most obvious were locating the dates and putting a pattern together. Every time the United States was in global conflict (wars), the immigration process slowed down because people were afraid of living in a country that was fighting a stronger power. 

Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.

-Presently, I know that the United States is more hard on immigrants. They now need proper documents to arrive and live in the country and if they don't, the United States doesn't give them a chance to earn the papers, it's just deportation. In the next two decades, I feel that it will get worse with immigration as we are now in a recession again. When more immigrants arrive, they might take jobs from US citizens causing no jobs and little money making process which will further increase our 14 trillion deficit in the economy.

Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.

-At first I had an idea for my group to take clips from YouTube™ that showcased many of the events that affected immigration, but that became too tiresome as we only had 3 days to work on the project. We then switched to a 3D graph visualization. 

What parts of group work were challenging?

-The dates I found challenging were finding accurate and major events that caused immigration or immigrants to leave the US. For instance, in the 1960's we entered the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I thought that would be major enough, but it was not accurate as the Cold War was 85% shielded by the government and anyone who knew of what happened int hose times denied the very fact of it taking place. 

What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?

-If I could redo this project over again I would create a movie using the clips from YouTube™ and make a moving graph that showcased the immigration change. Instead of a bar graph, I would create a line graph.