Interaction or origin-destination flow data provide very important information about the relationships between places. Migration and commuting to work are probably the most important activities for which reasonable data sets are available. Not only are these activities of significant interest to academic researchers, they are also of major importance to practitioners and policy makers.  In some cases where the geographical units are small, national sets of flow data are huge and sparsely populated.  In other cases, where spatial units are large, consideration must be given to intra-area flows as well as inter-area flows. Handling flow data tends to be more complicated than handling stock data because of the need to deal with a geography of origins and a geography of destinations which may not necessarily be the same. This strand of the Festival is devoted to providing an understanding of the methods associated with obtaining, estimating, measuring, analysing, modelling and projecting migration and commuting flow activities.  The morning session focuses more on data acquisition, estimation and measurement issues, drawing heavily on census data and on work undertaken by researchers associated with the Centre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research (CIDER).  The afternoon session considers a range of alternative methodological approaches to analysis, modelling and projection of interaction data, involving presentations from leading researchers with expertise in handling migration and/or commuting flows.

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