Name Popularity: A Visual Representation

I represented the dataset of the most popular baby names from 2001-2010 as a radial hierarchy. The data was categorized by rank, year, gender, name, and frequency, so there were a lot of possible interesting visualizations. Here is the way I chose to view it:

This graph is a radial hierarchy made with the visualization platform Flourish. The data shown by gender (blue and pink), as well as the frequency of name use across all the years (total count), effectively shows the most popular baby names across the decade. It is also important to note that there is a significantly larger sample size of male baby names recorded compared to female, so we cannot make comparisons across gender from this particular graph. As you can see, Jack was the most popular boy name and Sophie was the most popular girl name. Some customizations I added to make the data more digestible were color coding by gender, adding a legend in the upper left corner, and increasing the overall bar height to see the scale more clearly. I played around with other types of hierarchy graphs (such as trees, sunbursts, and circles), but I found that the radial version displayed the story I wanted to tell most clearly. Rather than interpreting the data by year, I wanted to look at the trends of the decade as a whole.

In terms of the relevance to digital humanities, I think data visualization is a key aspect of the field. Data visualization can help make sense of datasets that are less clean or less quantitative by representing trends that might not be obvious at first glance. It can also make the data more accessible to scholars and the public. Interactive data sets like the one I created in Flourish allow the viewer to explore the data themselves and weave their own story from it. I think this is the most important aspect of data visualization in the field of digital humanities – it allows us to turn raw data into a story about society and change.