IMAGE Project

Project Description

The IMAGE (Internal Migration Around the GlobE) project was funded by the ESRC and hosted at the University of Leeds. The aim was to systematically investigate how internal migration — the propensity to change residence within national borders — varies between countries around the world, and to develop standardised measures for cross-national comparison.

I was the lead developer of the IMAGE Studio, a standalone analytical software tool written in C# and Fortran 95 that implements a suite of internal migration measures and addresses key methodological challenges, including:

• Intensity indices (migration effectiveness, gross migraproduction rate)
• Impact measures (migration connectivity, net migration rate)
• Distance-related measures (mean distance migrated, distance decay parameters)
• Age profile analysis

The tool was used to analyse migration data from 80+ UN countries and published in Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy.

Skills Used

• C# .NET (Visual Studio)
• Fortran 95
• R / RStudio (statistical analysis and visualisation)
• ArcGIS / QGIS
• Migration modelling and spatial analysis