The Curfew

Readers of this blog have probably noticed that I am fond of visual ways of exploring complex issues.  Often that involves maps but sometimes, as with ICED, that means web-based games.  The Curfew is a game (currently in beta) from Channel4 and LittleLoud in the UK with the support of groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others.

Set in an authoritarian Britain in 2027, the game allows you to explore, in a compelling, fun way, issues such as privacy, citizenship, security, surveillance, civil liberties, and human rights.  The production values are very high with a mix of live action and computer graphics and, if you login to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, it integrates information about you into the game as an extra creepy bonus.  Give it a look and let me know what you think!

As part of it’s very interesting “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact” series, the New York Times has put up a fascinating interactive map that displays the country of origin for the foreign-born population by county.

This is pretty cool in itself but the demographics fun is multiplied when you notice the slider that lets you look at the map using data from every census back to 1880.  Want to see how the population of your home county has changed over the last 128 years?  Just move the slider and watch the color coding shift.  Want to see where people from a particular county settled, and when?  Just choose one of the countries a drop-down menu and you can see what counties they settled in.  Sadly the list of countries isn’t very long but does cover the most common countries of origin.

A mouse-over of the county will cause the county, it’s number of foreign-born residents, and total population — all for the selected census–to be identified in a bubble.

New York Times–Immigration Explorer