As part of my PhD research I recently produced the map below (high res. version) that shows the diversity of surnames in Great Britain. I wanted to demonstrate that surname diversity is not uniform across Great Britain. For example towns and cities (especially London) have relatively high surname diversities compared with rural areas because more migrants and single people live in them. Wales has a very low surname diversity due to its past naming conventions. The measure used is calculated by dividing the number of surnames by the total population of each Output Area (OA). There are over 200,000 OAs in Britain. Urban OAs are very small despite accounting for a large proportion of the total population, so I have scaled the size of each OA by their population (the map is therefore a cartogram). This creates the somewhat bloated appearance of Great Britain, but serves to emphasise the increased surname diversity (due to more single people and migrants) in towns and cities. The correct shape of Great Britain is shown in the inset. For more technical info please see below.
To create this map I used ArcGIS 10 and the Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool. The nice thing about the tool is that it is not dependent on VBA and therefore worked straight off in ArcGIS 10. There are over 220,000 spatial units in this map and the tool had no problems processing them. I have not found any alternatives that work for this volume of data.
As part of the research group that created the National Trust Surnames Profiler I have access to a comprehensive database of surnames in Great Britain. Most of my analysis on this database is spatial so I thought I would look at non-spatial way of illustrating the fact that in Britain the majority of people have a rare surname and that there are relatively few “popular”. This distribution is often referred to as having a long tail, as can be seen from the graph below. I find this graph lacks impact and novelty and it is hard to label a meaningful number of names along the x-axis. The surname clouds above have a greater impact by clearly demonstrating the popularity of a few surnames, such as Smith and Jones, in Britain and the large numbers of rarer surnames. I have only included the top 500 names for clarity. Comparisons between 1881 and 2001 are interesting. It would appear that the big names, such as Smith, dominate less now than they once did. The effects of migration also show in 2001 with names such as Patel, Kahn and Singh making an appearance. You can see how your name compares globally here. I am not sure if a word cloud would stand up to peer review for a journal but I think it would make a more interesting addition to presentations and posters than a simple line graph.
Yesterday I presented the paper “Combining Historic Interpretations of the Great Britain Popualtion with Contemporary Spatial Analysis: the Case of Surnames” during the Geospatial Computing Workshop at the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science . You can download the extended abstract here and I have uploaded the complete presentation below. In later posts I will provide a summary of the other papers presented in what I thought was a very interesting session.
