📊 Name Popularity

📊 Name Popularity

My most recent project has been centered around the data.gov's API containing all of the names and their counts that represent all babies born and registered at birth in the United States. It is a fascinating body of data. And while most of my work has been on aggregating and feature engineering, I MIGHT have gotten a little sidetracked with the joys of data visualization for a bit. But I think  you might thank me.

So I want to share that joy with you! What I am saying is: querying this data is incredibly and addictively entertaining.  So I put two of my favorite functions into a nice little Google Colab notebook that you can open and query too! The first function is plot_name(), which takes a name, gender, and color and will return the plot for that name and its popularity over the years 1880 to 2018 in the United States in the color you specify. Let your curiosity run wild, and satisfy it with real and truthful answers.

The second function is called how_many_ever() and will return the total number of people for a given gender and name along with a cute little image portraying the popularity of the name in question. Fun times!

So enjoy! I am sure having my share of fun giggling and pondering the presence of different names and popularities. Open in Colab, and let the queries begin. Here is the notebook 👇

Some of my favorite query results and plots:

Remember: These names are the names these infants were REGISTERED with at birth. WOW!

I am a female named "Evan", but females named Chester, I feel like that would be FAR more challenging to grow up with than mine.
plot-1

They really named their sons "Dude". They let that be registered by the US government. Interesting! More power to ya! (And these were way before "The Big Lebowski" made it utterly cool.
plot--1--1

I bet those are some AWESOME women right there! May they shine!
plot--2--1

Live up to it, boys! Live up to it!
plot--3--1

You named your sons "Felcia"? You do not think they will mind? May it give them strength and wisdom in trying times!
plot--4--1

You do know the point of nicknames, right? Like aliases or variables? They can be easily altered.
plot--5--1