stevenberlinjohnson.com

« Interface Avant-Garde, Where Art Thou? | Main | The Weird Turn Pro »

February 15, 2005

Naming Names

I won't even get into the wonderful -- and incredibly useful, at least for parents -- information design at Baby Names Wizard's "Name Voyager" tool. (Do a search on "Max" to see great example of a name's rise-and-fall-and-rise-again popularity cycle.) I think the most striking thing about the tool is the image you see when you first start it up: the overall distribution of names over the past century. The graphics look something like one of those images you'll see of sedimentary layers viewed from the side, with each layer representing the popularity path of a name through the twentieth century. At various points in this history, a few names are dominant, and so their layers are larger: Mary is very hot through 1950; Michael peaks in the mid 1960s; James does well through most of the century.

Now here's the kicker: as you get to the 1990s, all the larger layers grow more narrow; compared to all the other decades, there are no dominant names. Baby names come and go; there are cycles of naming just as there are cycles of fashion. But this is a different kind of trend: a shift in the overall distribution of names. We're a nation of niche naming now -- all tail, and no head.

P.S. I've always want to see something like this for both time and space, showing the geographic spread of names over time. Do trendy names follow the same patterns that fashions do -- starting in the urban centers and slowly spreading to middle America and suburbia, with pockets that have their own self-sustaining fashion systems? Or do they follow different patterns? There should be a Weather Channel for things like this. "There's a major system of Zoe's sweeping into the northeast from Chicago. Meanwhile, that flood of belly piercing we reported in the Rust Belt has dissipated."

Posted by sberlin at February 15, 2005 12:12 PM

Comments

That is a very, very cool tool.
We (well, I) thought we'd decided on our first child's name (due in July), but I know this thing is gonna crack it open again... or at least provide a lot of wasted hours, testing out different names...

Posted by: mhanlon at February 15, 2005 01:20 PM

If I remember right, Scientific American once published a summary (based on someone else's study) of the prevalence of names over a broader historical period than the NameVoyager covers, but without the graphical display. It gave the same impression: names seem to behave like populations, or like nature's experiments with new species, suddenly appearing, sometimes vanishing soon after, sometimes persisting, etc.

Posted by: John Branch at February 16, 2005 06:13 PM

Very nice! Any idea who created this? I can't find any credits. It smells a lot like Martin Wattenberg.

Posted by: Maarten at February 16, 2005 11:44 PM

Another thing I noticed is that, in general and particularly in the last few decades, the most popular boys names are more popular than the most popular girls names. The lack of dominance is more noticeable with girls' names. I think part of this is that the tendency to find some cute/different spelling is more prevalent with girls' names than boys' - there's only so many ways one can spell Michael, as opposed to a name like Katelyn/Caitlin/etc.

Posted by: Abby at February 18, 2005 08:30 PM

Leave it to Steve Johnson, a real philosopher hiding behind a “journalist” title (interface) or behind his self proclaimed “interloper/critic” title, to sense a deeper pattern (despite the wit and humor with which it’s delivered) in an already interesting product/software like this name voyager.

What’s in a name? Well, sound vibrations when spoken for one, and specifically sound vibrations of a certain duration and frequency – and a specific pitch and tonal quality in different parts of the country/ world.
Now, adopt for a moment the “it’s all interface, all of the macro story and visuals (including snow scenes and garbage) --- think of the sounds we make ( including the music, especially the music) as part of a code of sorts, (I’m not a programmer, one of you techies can fill in the kind of code it might be..) and suddenly his comment takes on a whole other meaning ---,
--- suddenly it’s patterns of code flowing through time and space and translating to us minds living in the interface universe (and to those like Steven Berlin, who bother groping for a translation) information that may be quite useful in our daily interface world;

Take just the time aspect of it for example, were the “Zoe” vibrations, or whatever name was most prevalent in 1929 (I don’t know), may be a good predictor of another market crash as that name crescendo’s to a peak again, at the same ranking, in the future -- --,

and then add space (what a great idea !) and maybe that particular sound was only popular in America at the time, but possibly now, it’s building in intensity in other parts of the world, Europe? Asia? ---, to predict a similar economic doom (or abundance, in some other name/sound pattern), and suddenly the collective sounds/frequencies of our individual names become almost a symphony of RFID tags tracking through space and time to reveal much data to those who try to mine it.

I have a friend, a bit flaky (new age, health food stores, the whole bit) who claims that when you change a person’s name, you change their whole destiny. In fact, she tells me, there is a whole discipline called numerology, that helps people change their lives by advising them on the change of names (each letter has a numerical value, etc..) that vibrate well with the numbers of their birth, etc..,etc…
Well, if you start to think of names as a kind of individual RFID tag in a larger computational system, then that whole flako theory of numerology suddenly isn’t so crazy anymore --- then of course a name change would change your whole place in the system – i.e., your destiny. And yea, maybe his dad is more right than he knew. Maybe adding Berlin WILL sell more books than just the Steven Johnson name. And then again, maybe less ---

Posted by: HelenHockney at February 20, 2005 11:20 AM

Hello, I'm the author of The Baby Name Wizard. It was a pleasure to see this description of the NameVoyager, viewing it the way I hoped it would be viewed! The visualization -- from the "sedimentary" overview to the letter-by-letter zoom -- was designed to reveal name choices as trends in a cultural context.

The name distribution has indeed shifted over the past 50 years. In the 1950s, the top 10 names for boys and girls accounted for a quarter of all American babies. Today, it's less than a tenth. I constantly hear from parents who are distraught that their favorite name is becoming popular. The very idea that "popular" is a negative value refects a huge societal shift. We now fear blending in, rather than sticking out.

(To the reader who sensed the inimitable "scent" of Martin Wattenberg in the visualization, good call! Martin is my husband, and the architect of the NameVoyager.)

Posted by: Laura Wattenberg at February 22, 2005 09:38 AM

A friend of mine told me about this place. I love it. I will recommend you to all my friends.
See you again next time I surf around.

Posted by: Bea at February 23, 2005 03:46 AM

One possibility is that now we are more aware of the searchability of everything, the desirability of a unique name increases. I wonder if people do a 'whois' lookup to see if the domain is available before naming their babies - it might explain some of the ones I've seen in Silicon Valley.

As for the mapping of memetic flow, you should read 'Belwether' by Connie Willis for a great novelistic treatment of this idea, interspersed with real case studies.

Posted by: Kevin Marks at February 24, 2005 03:15 AM

Wow! Great tool. Thanks for the link...

Posted by: Jessica Lopez at February 25, 2005 04:15 PM