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A data adventure in Boston, 1929: historical census corpus analysis

Rory Foulger, Wolfram Research
Posted 27 days ago

A data adventure in Boston, 1929: historical census corpus analysis

Attachments:
1929namesoccupations.rtf
DOWNLOAD-DESKTOP...nb
fts-2.txt
topboysnames1929.csv
topgirlnames1929.csv
POSTED BY: Rory Foulger
7 Replies
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POSTED BY: Robert Nachbar

Brilliant!
POSTED BY: Ahmed Elbanna
Mark Greenberg
Mark Greenberg
Posted 25 days ago

Hi, Rory. This was fun to read. Two things I especially liked about your post:

  • It shows a more conversational, stream-of-consciousness style for a computational essay. Presenting an idea and supporting it with code and graphics doesn't have to be a dry, serious "essay". It can have personality and vitality.
  • You show that data cleaning, part of many computational analysis projects, takes persistence and clever use of the Wolfram Language's string and pattern matching functions. You started with pre-computer primary documents and were able to extract usable data. Data cleaning can be discouraging for those doing this kind of project for the first time.

Thanks for the post!
POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Thanks, Mark! I had a lot of fun! Glad you enjoyed. People often overlook the data cleaning, and it's nice to sometimes actually demonstrate what goes into getting a nice dataset.

POSTED BY: Rory Foulger
POSTED BY: Ahmed Elbanna

Thanks Ahmed! Yes, always nice when first assumptions are validated. And the number of couples named Mary and Joseph was my biggest haha moment, though it didn't make it into the essay.
POSTED BY: Rory Foulger

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POSTED BY: EDITORIAL BOARD
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