Over the Christmas holidays I was doing some work experience at a national paper. As it was December, people were throwing around ideas to try and decide how to mark the passing year. One article proposal was to try and see what names had been the most popular in 2011.
The newspaper is the place where many people announce and record the births of their children. The plan was to tally all the names from the birth announcements and see if there were any particular names that were popular with the readers this year.
As this was the first time that this had been attempted, there would be no previous years to compare the data with, but if the concept was successful, it was something that could be repeated every year and patterns could be established.
Of course this was not an exhaustive list, but limited to the readers of that particular paper, who had chosen to register their child’s birth that year. It is possible to get data on the most popular baby names nationwide, but this was a project limited to this particular demographic.
I was drafted in and given copies of all the birth announcements. Of course this was not a straightforward task. For one thing, the records were hard copy rather than digital. As well as this, there was no database or spreadsheet that contained the information. Hard copies it was.
The first thing that I decided to do was to limit this to first names and ignore middle names unless they were hyphenated to the first name. Then I decided to produce two different data sets, one for boys’ names and one for girls’ names, as the two are not directly comparable. (You wouldn’t be considering the name James for a girl. Or maybe you would…I don’t know how your mind works…)
Within two excel spreadsheets, I then produced a different column for each letter of the alphabet. Then it was time for the hard work to start. The paper had received over 1,330 birth announcements in that year alone, and each one was buried between deaths and engagements.
Fortunately they did have their own clearly marked subheading, so it wasn’t too hard to spot them, but occasionally there weren’t any birth announcements, and every few weeks they had larger features on newborns, which also had to be spotted and included.
The autofill function on Excel became both a blessing and a curse, filling in the most common names for me and saving me typing time, but also assuming that I meant to type things that I didn’t, meaning that I had to be constantly alert. When all the names had been inputted, I ordered the columns alphabetically, scanned for the most frequently occurring by eye (they stood out fairly easily) and then selected the cells with the names in to get a count for each high frequency name.
I was fairly sure that there was a whizzy automated way of doing this at the time, but just couldn’t get my head around a solution, and as time was tight before the deadline, this had to do. I would certainly be open to ideas to make the process more efficient
The article turned out to be royal themed, as William and Harry topped the list. Surprisingly, Isabella made the top of the girls’ list, although we had a debate over whether to include variants like Isabelle, Isobel and Isabel along with the name. (IThey did get put together in the end, but with a proviso that it was ‘variants of Isabelle’, Max and Maximillian also got lumped together.)
So, names as data? Well they can tell an interesting story about the hopes and aspirations of a demographic of readers. What you choose to call your children is data in its own right. And just like your life expectancy and your house price, it can say a lot about you. It certainly made an interesting study.
Please do comment below if you know how I could have improved my system, I might be able to pass the information on to the next work experience girl to take on the task!
