Story Data Story two: Black Name Analysis part 2: Prepare, Process, Analyze

It’s time for Part 2 of my Story Data Story Black Onomastics trilogy. We’re still covering my collection, organization, and analysis of data regarding Black names.

I decided to work with the names from The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases after all, and this meant adding another 60,000+ entries before I cleaned it, resulting in 67,030 entries and 48296 unique names.
I’ve ended up with a Google spreadsheet that has 7 sheets with over 123,125 rows and a total of 66,565 unique names. Is there any wonder I want more power to shift through this?

In any case, I want to answer as many of my questions as I can with the spreadsheet as it is and then move the data into Tableau so I can compare it with US Census name data going back to 1880. The finale will hopefully have chord diagrams and other cool visualizations.

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Story Data Story One: Ideas Masterlist

This is the first of several posts covering the story of how I assemble and utilize data for creative projects. In this case, I’ll look at the spreadsheet where I store the data of prospective, in-progress, and on-submission stories and ideas.

Most of my professional content will be hosted on my GitHub portfolio but I thought my blog was as good a place as any to practice a bit of data storytelling!

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Story Research Introduction: I Love Spreadsheets!

I aim to share a few data storytelling posts here in the future to explain some of the more complex spreadsheets I’ve created, but I want to introduce this career transition by sharing images of some of my earliest worldbuilding spreadsheets (dating from roughly 2005~2011). It’s from a project where people can enter dreams a la Paprika or Inception. I won’t be sharing more information than that, but if you’re like me, the data itself will pique your interest and inspire your imagination.

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