Please join with me in celebrating a milestone with a member of the Baby Name Wizard family. The NameVoyager visualization has just received its first upgrade, with expanded data and a few new tricks up its sleeve.
The two changes NameVoyager users will notice most:
Happy exploring!
Some additional data notes, for the hardcore NameVoyager fans:
The popularity figures now go up through 2004, the most recent numbers available. I've used 2004 as the sole representative for the current decade, rather than mixing scales of data. Thanks to reader requests, I'll be planning a separate version of the program with a detailed focus on the past decade.
The data in this version represents a fuller sample of babies, courtesy of new Social Security Administration figures. For the 1940s on, the sample is a close approximation of the full U.S. newborn population. The earliest years' numbers, though, are based on more skewed samples. For instance, the sex ratio is skewed dramatically toward girls in the 19th-century samples. I adopted a new normalization technique to correct for these differences, and informal data checks suggest that the trends in the early data are still suitably representative of the general population. Also, you may notice that the full "sea of names" view has a slightly different shape, reflecting a tweaked data prep process. The height of the total population for a given decade now accurately shows the proportion of babies receiving a top-1000 name.
Comments
Great Improvements! I loved seeing even more history!
Awesome changes, Laura. Thank you!
Can you explain how to do the sex-specific searches?
Whee! I love this thing! Love your book, too!
Laura, you rock! The Wizard has become my favorite blog. I have always had a particular fascination for names and am now able to indulge it regularly. It is so refreshing to read well written and thoughtful posts on the Web!--Elizabeth
Thanks for the update, and the explanation. Your care in the presentation and analysis of the data is why I come to your site and keep coming back (and decided I ought to go ahead and buy the book).
So does it only work in Internet Explorer?
Neither the old nor the new work in Firefox. I've never bothered to figure out why... They both work in Safari.
They work fine in FireFox for me - maybe you need to (re)install the Java extension. Anyway, Laura, thanks for the upgrade - I'm still in awe of this fascinating tool and your rigorous insights. One interesting thing I noted from the new opening display: over the last 20 years, the top 1000 names account for a smaller fraction of names overall (fewer per 1,000,000) than in the past. This ties in nicely with your observations about the growing numbers of novel names in recent decades.Once again, great job!
This site is very cool
Fascinating! I am Indian and have always been interested about names/naming...I learnt a lot about Western/American names here.
I just looked up the name Margaret. I noticed some blue in the Voyager results. Were there boys named Margaret? Or, is this a mistake? Thanks.
Wow! Thank you! I keep coming back to your site week after week to hear your latest news & insights. I love it.
I've used the old and the new in Firefox. I may have had to previously download the java app for some other site, but you have to do that for IE as well. Anyway, either your settings or the java client are probably the problem. If it's the java client you can get it at http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp
The url isn't showing up properly, here are the two halves that you could cut and paste together:http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp
About the boys named Margaret, there's an FAQ entry about that:http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyagerfaq.html#oddities
I love the improvements. This is such a fun tool. We used the social security website extensively to look for names for our baby. One thing we noticed is that letters like 'N' were in the top 1000 is some decades. These don't show up in name voyager. Did you decide to exclude single letter names? I would be interested in how the popularity of such a bizarre naming custom waxes and wanes.
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