To investigate the question, “What is a New York City rat, and where did it come from?” the New York Times checks in with researchers at Fordham University, led by Jason Munshi-South, who have embarked on a rat-tracking study to find the answer to that very question (among others). It turns out that–much like the city’s millions of two-legged inhabitants–the answer is “everywhere,” from Galapagos and Brazil to New Zealand and Japan.

We’re all immigrants at some point

Queens is one of the most diverse places on the planet, and it’s believed that around 500 languages are spoken here. Fifty-nine of these, however, are endangered, meaning that those who speak these languages are the last people on Earth who know them. This number is staggering, considering the fact that UNESCO puts the worldwide number of “critically endangered” languages at 574, which is why artist Mariam Ghani has embarked on a mapping project that explores these disappearing tongues. First shared by Fast Co. Design, The Garden of the Forked Tongues is an online, interactive graphic and an acrylic mural in the Queens Museum, both of which plot colored polygons to represent how the languages are distributed throughout the borough.

All the info

Puzzled at how many conversations about international issues turned to the subject of immigration no matter what the original context might have been, NYC-based entrepreneur and data visualization geek Max Galka created a map showing the flow of immigration to and from each of the world’s nations to better visualize where the patterns really lay.

In addition to topics like terrorism, Brexit, this year’s presidential race and the refugee crisis, according to Galka, immigration was “being mentioned in connection with all sorts of topics I never would have expected.” Finding that the debates on immigration, though sometimes heated, were lacking in factual information, he hopes that his mapping efforts, brought to us via his blog Metrocosm, can provide some real-world context on questions like, “how many migrants are there? Where are they coming from? And where are they going?”

Take a look at the map to see who’s coming and going

New York’s immigration history is a long and complex one, and still today 37 percent of city residents are foreign-born. Using data from the 2010-2014 American Community Survey, the NYU Furman Center created this easy-to-read map that shows the top ten countries of origin, how many such New Yorkers there are (each dot represents 500 residents born in the respective country), and where they live (h/t Untapped).

The full map and more info

First spotted by CityLab, these dot maps called Mapping Immigrant America are colorful in two senses of the word. Kyle Walker, assistant professor of geography at Texas Christian University, used census tract data to map America’s immigrant population. The nine countries of origin (Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Southwest Asia, Europe, Oceania, and Canada) are represented with a different hued dot, creating a picture of diversity and ethnic enclaves. With each dot standing in for 20 immigrants, a quick look at a city’s color palette tells a lot about its cultural makeup.

More maps ahead

New York prides itself on its diversity, so it comes as no surprise that we have the second-highest immigration population in the country. But what may be surprising is that the most immigrants–other than those from Mexico–in our state come from China, according to this informative map. In nearby New Jersey and Connecticut, India is responsible for the largest immigrant group.

More on the map here

We often talk about specific neighborhoods’ immigration history–Little Germany in the East Village, El Barrio in East Harlem, or the capital of Jewish America on the Lower East Side. But when we look at the city as a whole, there’s been some pretty interesting immigration patterns over its nearly-400-year history. To visualize this timeline, the data gurus over at Metrocosm have put together an interactive infographic that shows the change in these immigration waves from 1626 to 2013 and how they relate to world events regarding these given countries.

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