For my project I chose to focus on the distribution of male versus female baby names, looking at the ranks of all of the baby names that scored in the top three at least once in the ten year period. To do this I had to modify the dataset that we were given, because I could not figure out if either of the sites we were supposed to use had a filter function, so I did that manually in the raw spreadsheet. I went through and deleted all the lines of names that were not one of the seventeen currently displayed, which helped to lower the general noise from the amount of boxes that were originally displayed with the raw data. One of the most important topics covered in our lecture on Thursday was the idea that in order for the presented data to truly matter it has to be legible to the audience, and this was how I attempted to do so.
I chose to display this data as a box plot because, despite the amount of data displayed on the screen, it is easily understandable, and can easily communicate the perspective I wanted to take. As shown in the first graph, the most popular baby names list for boys was dominated by two names for the entirety of the given data, with Joshua and Jack both having their first quartile on the number one ranking. The only time in the data that neither Joshua nor Jack was the most popular was once, with Liam taking over the top spot in 2010, the last year of the study. This was a massive outlier however, as the name’s next highest spot in the rankings was at 7. A few other names, such as Oliver and James, had outlier years that reached the top two, but other than a single year, the entire decade was dominated by two names alone.
This is in stark contrast to the distribution for female baby names, as five different names (Jessica, Emma, Sophie, Ella, and Charlotte) all topped the list over the course of the decade. That is not the only very noticeable difference, as the times when those names were the most popular is listed as an outlier in the dataset. Three other names (Ruby, Hannah, Olivia) placed in the top two at least once as well.
In conclusion, simply due to the amount of names at the top of the rankings, it is fair to say that in the 2000’s, male baby names were far less original than female ones.
2 thoughts on “The Unoriginality of Male Baby Names”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Great post, Will! We both used different graphs to reach very similar conclusions, which was neat to see. I’m really impressed with the changes you made to aid comprehensibility. The coloring changes were helpful of course, but the actual altering of the data set even cooler. It eliminated a lot of the variability that graphs using the whole set had while still effectively capturing your message.
This is a really cool approach to this data and your chart is revealing things I didn’t notice at first glance. Pretty crazy to think “Jack” never ranked outside the top 4 (and that was in the last year of the study too). I’m a fan of the writing style of your post too – it’s balanced really well between formality and easygoingness while still getting a lot across. I’m curious what other graphs would produce a clean visualization of the same data you used, just to see how they change our interpretation of it if at all. Very cool 👍