My Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) working paper titled “Family Names as Indicators of Britain’s Changing Regional Geography” has been published online. The paper is one of my PhD upgrade documents and contains the results from much of the research I have completed in my first year. I begin by outlining the significance of surnames in Britain before outlining some of the spatial analysis I have employed to discover if there is a regionality in the British populations’ surnames, and whether this has changed between 1881 and 2001. My results contain plenty of maps to demonstrate where I think the regions fall and I accompany these with a discussion of the appropriateness of each of the methodologies I have used. I must stress that this is a working paper and therefore provides a benchmark on the way to completed research- many of my results and the subsequent conclusions have yet to undergo the rigours of peer review. You can download a copy of the paper here. I have pasted the abstract below.
Family Names as indicators of Britain’s Changing Regional Geography
James Cheshire, Pablo Mateos, and Paul A. Longley
In recent years the geography of surnames has become increasingly researched in genetics, epidemiology, linguistics and geography. Surnames provide a useful data source for the analysis of population structure, migrations, genetic relationships and levels of cultural diffusion and interaction between communities. The Worldnames database (www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames) of 300 million people from 26 countries georeferenced in many cases to the equivalent of UK Postcode level provides a rich source of surname data. This work has focused on the UK component of this dataset, that is the 2001 Enhanced Electoral Role, georeferenced to Output Area level.
Exploratory analysis of the distribution of surnames across the UK shows that clear regions exist, such as Cornwall, Central Wales and Scotland, in agreement with anecdotal evidence. This study is concerned with applying a wide range of methods to the UK dataset to test their sensitivity and consistency to surname regions. Methods used thus far are hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering, barrier algorithms, such as the Monmonier Algorithm, and Multidimensional Scaling. These, to varying degrees, have highlighted the regionality of UK surnames and provide strong foundations to future work and refinement in the UK context. Establishing a firm methodology has enabled comparisons to be made with data from the Great British 1881 census, developing insights into population movements from within and outside Great Britain.
Ben Fry has produced a map of the USA’s landscape patterns by plotting only its roads. His All Streets project involved collating network data covering all the roads in the lower 48 United States (26 million road segments!) and mapping them (see below). It is a very simple idea that produces remarkable results. Roads are good representations of population density and the economic value of an area; they also try to follow a line of least resistance. Roads tend to avoid going across the grain of the landscape so you find them concentrating along valleys rather than up the side of mountains. This is clear on the West Coast of America, for example. The resulting image looks like it could have been taken from a satellite and works especially well due to the size of the USA and the quantity of its roads.
Although nowhere near as effective, I have attempted to do the same for Great Britain (see below) using data from Open Street Map. From this you can see the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District in England and the Snowdonia National Park in Wales. My favourite aspects of this map are along the coast where roads tend to follow the edge of estuaries and along rivers inland. Both maps show that landscape features still play an important role in the way we can move around. This perhaps is less surprising in the USA, but serves as a reminder that a small crowded island like Britain still has isolated communities.
Thanks to Allen Pope for sending me a New Scientist article on this.
I wanted to avoid the misleading effects of poorly selected spatial units and inappropriate data categorisation in my next Featured Map. I produced it for a forthcoming CASA Working Paper to inform my analysis of general surname trends in Great Britain by accounting for areas of large numbers of “non-British” names. By running Electoral Roll data through UCL’s Onomap classification I was able to classify people’s names according to their origin, and extract all the names that were not classified as “English”, “Scottish”, “Welsh” and “Cornish”. This method is, of course, not completely perfect but it provides very good context to my analysis. I have opted for 10 categories and small spatial units (Output Areas) to emphasise the clustering of “non-British” names around urban centres. Reproducing the map at Admin. District level gives the impression that the most of Britain is inhabited by people with “non-British” names- something that is clearly not the case.
This map is one I created for a working paper I am currently writing. Using surnames from the 1881 census of Great Britain, I have been implementing a measure (the Lasker’s Distance) that establishes the similarity of populations based on their Coefficient of Isonymy. The Lasker’s Distance enables the similarities or differences between populations (in this case those in British Districts) to be thought of in terms of ‘surname space’. Put simply, areas that have more surnames in common can be considered closer together than areas with fewer common surnames. This is useful as it enables a number of analysis techniques to be applied to the resulting distance values. In this case Ward’s Hierarchical Clustering has been applied to produce 15 clusters. The map represents each of these clusters with a unique colour. These results suggest that regions are present in the geography of British surnames. This map should be considered as preliminary as it is yet to undergo academic review.
Below is the presentation I gave at POPfest 2009 on the 2nd July. The conference took place at LSE during one of the hottest weeks of the year and the organizers did a great job of keeping the delegates happy with plenty of strawberries, chilled drinks and sweets. I found the informal and friendly atmosphere a great place to discuss new ideas and find out what other postgraduates are up to in the field of Population Studies.
