The Migration Mapping project, located at migrationmapping.org, seeks to map migration as a conceptual field. Its aim is to identify, describe, and track the verbal, visual, aural, and digital forms through which we make sense of migration as human practice.

Below is a loose chronology of the Migration Mapping project and how it led to the founding of the M2Lab. The timeline was written by Dr Sumita Chakravarty and edited by research fellow Johann Yamin.

2010: Dr Sumita Chakravarty develops the idea of trying to conceptualize the intersection of media and migration, hoping to discover the implications of the deeper intersections between the two for a book project. She aims to explore the tensions between these two fields, and also to reveal underlying patterns giving shape to their interactions. Chakravarty searches across disciplines and uses an expansive notion of media to include diverse forms of expression and commentary, also attending migration-related conferences.

2013: Chakravarty starts teaching classes on Media and Migration at The New School, continuing to do so until 2020.

2014: A grant application is made to create a website called The Online Migration Museum Research Project. At the time, Chakravarty wrote:

"It combines the features of a museum (an exhibition space to highlight current concerns, specific topics or thematic clusters), a database (a repository for images, video and critical material on migration with educational notes), and a collaboratory (partnerships on research questions utilizing advanced methods).

Most websites on migration serve as community archives or as bulletin boards; in other words, they are nostalgic evocations of a community’s arrival and settlement, or provide practical information for immigrant groups. Migration museum websites are linked to bricks-and-mortar museums in various parts of the world, and emphasize the role of migration in that country’s history. As one website I encountered in my research puts it, such projects see themselves as part of the heritage sector. In contrast, my project locates itself in the spaces opened up by multi-modal and digital scholarship."

2015: The beginnings of the project takes shape, with the homepage seen below. Wordpress was used as a simple and free platform to launch this investigation.

2016-18: Other design ideas and ideas for content creation proliferated, as did research of various media produced in the past and present. Chakravarty assembles small research teams to access different kinds of ‘data’. From these there emerged a sense of a core vocabulary—verbal, visual, and narrative—that provide the cultural and imaginative ‘tools’ to address migration.

It becomes clear that not all the materials being accumulated could be published as a book. With the emphasis on archiving existing media as source material, it was appropriate to find a repository that could display them, and that would allow for constant updating on a topic that had become increasingly important worldwide. This results in the Migration Mapping project website, which was officially launched on April 9, 2016 in honor of Chakravarty's mother's birthday.

2016: Chakravarty goes to Paris to meet with Dana Diminescu, a scholar who tracking European migration from a sociological perspective, and interested in collaborating on the cinema of immigration.

Chakravarty starts The Migration Blog on the Migration Mapping site for original content, including interviews with artists, short media reviews, and descriptions of migration-related spaces. Chakravarty also wrote about the migration museums visited in New York, London, Paris, and Gydnia, Poland. From 2017, the Blog is adapted to a Newsletter that continues to provide updates about the Migration Mapping project.

2017: On June 10, 2017, The New School hosts an event at The Bedford in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Titled "The New School X Northside Festival: Migration, Media, and Music: A Conversation With The New School," its goal is to “increase awareness of The New School’s progressive approach to scholarship, media and the arts among influencers in media, politics, design, and technology. Create connections among these influencers by facilitating a cultural conversation centered around the narrative of migration in new and innovative ways.”

Chakravarty presents the Migration Mapping project there, and Mike Baldo, a young web developer reaches out to her to help enhance the website. Through an existing network of students who had worked with Chakravarty, the initiative could take off.

2018: It was decided that a brand new site would be added, which Chakravarty called the Media+Migration Lab or m2lab.net. Chakravarty drew on the idea of a prism and the prismatic to denote the multi-faceted nature of the phenomenon of migration, and Mike brought it to life for the M2lab website. Together, the Migration Mapping project and the M2Lab platform was called the Media+Migration Network by student researchers and fellows.

2020-22: The pandemic took its toll on the project as on everything else, but work on the M2Lab continued via dedicated student researchers and fellows.

2023-24: The Migration Mapping project receives a brand new look, updated with new datasets, entries, and concepts.