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Undocumented Realities: Advocating for Immigration Reform in the US
After Part II, I made some changes to my presentation.
To address the issue that there needed to be more human connection and the story felt too data heavy: I added more stories of undocumented immigrants and made sure they were from diverse voices. It was hard finding videos or stories on undocumented people who are European or African. So my porject only included videos I could find which was on the Hispanic and Asian undocumented communties. I also included pull quotes when I could, and tried to connect Vivianna, Carlos, Jose, and Mario’s stories throughout the presentation.
Canva Graphics on Undocumented Population: In part 2, my users suggested presenting the population data better by using something other than a bargraph. I decided to use, instead, piecharts for both the undocumented population as percentage of total immigrant population and for the graph on the total immigrant population. While these graphics may seem basic, I think it was the best way to get my point across. When I tried doing undocumented pop inside the immigrant pop which then was inside of the whole U.S. population, the undocumented population seemed insignificant and would not have helped my story.
For all the visualizations, I made the titles and legends larger. Additionally, I included the source at the botom and tried fixing how the graphic fit on Shorthand. It was a bit tricky making it fit well on shorthand and I tried as best as I could. Now you can see all the visualization but there is a lot of white space which I couldn’t fix. Also, for some you still need to scroll a little to see the graphic because I could not fix it as much as I tried. I tried even messing around with the code and finding where the measurements were but it did not work. If I had more time I would have definetely tried to play around with both Tableau and Shorthand to fix this issue.
Call to action, make it more local: In my call to action, one user suggested I included more local community based call to actions. Since Pittsburgh’s undocumented population is not as large as other places this was a little harder to do. So intead, I included the Latino Community Center as part of the call to action. I suggested that people could volunteer there since this organization helps recent and old immigrants settle in the U.S. and provides them and their families with resources.
My audience ended up being the general public. I know we talked in class about how this should be more narrow, but immigration as an issue that affects everyone, not just a certain group. In Part 2, I had said that my audience was the general public, policy professionals, and education professionals. While the latter two groups are important, my presentation did not direclty address them but rather addressed the general public. I think this topic is very important and there is so much misinformation surrounding it that the best thing is for everyone to know about the topic and the facts. If communities don’t come together to fight for immigrant justice and an immigration reform then it will never happen. This movement needs the help of anyone it can get.
I chose my color palette to be purple, yellows, and orange because in the campaign for a pathway to citizenship/immigrantion reform many people use the monarch butterflies to represent immigrants and migration. Many flyers, social media posts, informative graphics, and such use the colors I used or other similar ones to talk about this issue. I made sure to stick with this color palette throughout my website and my graphics. Having a cohesive color palette made the overall project feel more professional.
I had a few difficulties with this project regarding images and visualization choices. First, open-source images that related to my topic were difficult to find. I spent a lot of time on Unsplash and other open-source websites looking for images for my website. I had to think of synonyms or words that could come close to what I was looking for. I wanted to add more pictures of immigrants, especially undocumeted immigrants, but many of those images were copy-righted so I could not use them. Finding my way around open-source was difficult but it also helped me get better at looking for them in the future.
My other difficulty was the data visualizations, I know we went through many different examples in the class and in the textbooks, but I felt like my data was best represented in piecharts. I tried doing a donut chart, as one of my users suggested, but I spent too long on Tableau trying to do it and it did not work out. I think in the future, as I get better understandting and familiarity with Tableau I may be able to represent my data better but as for now I think what I have is still good. With that being said, I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to create the map to represent the overall population of each state and the population of undocumented immigrants in each state. It took many tries and lots of tweaking to get my map how I wanted it to. I had to keep going back and forth between my excel and Tableau because my Excel needed some tweaks so tableau could read it better. I also found the class demo on how to make graphics in tableau very helpful for when I made my map of the U.S.
I really enjoyed using Canva for some of my graphics. Prior to this class, I had no idea you could make graphs with Canva. I think it is a pretty neat feature and easy for beginners in data visualizations to get started with. Canva gave so many options for visualizations and it was easy to edit the data right there on the website while also editing the graph.
I am glad Shorthand got introduced in this class and I was able to use it for my final project. It is a neat website that lets you try many different things. There were moments when I felt a bit overwhelmed while sorting out the ideal way to present my content due to so many options to choose from. However, as I gained profiency, it became somewhat easier. In shorthand, I tried connecting my background images to the graphics and texts I was talking about. If you scroll through the section were I listed the benefits, industries, and economic contributions of undocumented folk, you can see how the background goes along with the information. I also tried to use the pull out quotes or sections with just one or two phrases to grab the viewers attention.
What helped me most to get all my ideas to come together and have a good outline, to then implement on Shorthand, was the story arc we did during part 1. It helped get me started with my project and gave me an idea how I wanted my storyboard and final project to look like.
Have been included at the end of the Shorthand website.
I found myself, throughout the course, wishing this class was a full semester rather than a Mini. I feel like my data visualizations could have impoved so much more with more time. I think Tableau, and other programs that create visualizations take a little more time to understand and work with. If I had more time, I would have tried to make all my graphics in Tableau, rather than Canva, and would have tried playing around with the formatting of Tableau. I would have tried making the graphics have a dark background, rather than white, and maybe tried different visualization designs.
With more time, I would have also tried to make my Shorthand website flow better. There were certain ideas in my head that I wanted to implemented but did not know how to. I wanted to have a section that you could swipe through to see more graphs. So, the section where I have many facts about undocumented people (regions, countries, where they reside in the U.S, and others), I would have made into a sort of carousel section where the user could flip through the graphics.