4 ms·

The Long Tail of Dog Names

49 points by yurivish 7y ago

leesalminen 7y ago
Very cool. I’ve always wanted to do this analysis with our company’s data set but never got around to it.
kiseleon 7y ago
The "Googly Eyes" button is a work of art.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I didn't know how much I needed that laugh just now.
danso 7y ago
Tangent: pet licensing data (which basically means dog licenses), particularly names and breeds, is always something I've wanted to analyze for fun, especially across jurisdictions, but always ends up being a huge data wrangling exercise. But MuckRock has a nice collection of completed public records requests for cities across America: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=pet+license&status=done&user-autocomplete=&agency-autocomplete=&jurisdiction-autocomplete=&projects-autocomplete=&tags-autocomplete=&has_embargo=&has_crowdfund=&minimum_pages=&date_range_0=&date_range_1=&file_types= https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=pet+license&status=done... For example, Houston's data is a 90MB Excel spreadsheet with more than a million rows, and includes columns like pet color and vaccination dates: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/houston-113/houston-tx-pet-licensing-data-40240/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/houston-113/houston-tx-pet-lice...
caymanjim 7y ago
My family had a German shepherd named "Duke" and a labrador named "Hershey". We're so predictable.
rolltiide 7y ago
Interesting how the Shibe Inu’s have Japanese names This is all New York data so why do you think that is? Seems more likely that people interested in Japan related things are buying and naming these dogs, less likely that it is Japanese owners, and nobody else is choosing these?
- munificent 7y ago
  I think the simpler observation is that it's a Japanese breed name, so they pick a name that fits that. If you look at many of the other breeds, the most common name is clearly a riff on the breed: Boxer -> Tyson (Chocolate) labrador -> Hershey Blue heeler -> Blue Jack Russell terrier -> Jack Chihuahua -> lots of Mexican names King Charles spaniel -> Charlie Pug -> Pugsly Dachshund (weiner dog) -> Nathan (brand of hot dogs) Boston terrier -> Buster (guessing this is because it's similar-sounding)
  - onorton 7y ago
    You missed English Bulldog -> Winston
    - munificent 7y ago
      Ah, good one!
bjterry 7y ago
The breed names don't render in Firefox for some reason.
- mbostock 7y ago
  I sent Yuri a suggestion to fix this. (The problem is that Firefox doesn’t resolve relative links from the textPath to the path element because of the page’s base element, so you need absolute links instead.)
  - yurivish 7y ago
    Just merged — thanks!
dbatten 7y ago
This is broken for me in both Firefox for Android and Chrome for Windows. Any ideas what might be up?
- yurivish 7y ago
  Mike Bostock suggested a code fix that I've just merged! Does it help?
- sli 7y ago
  The entire article is embedded external content with only a script tag -- all embedded in an iframe -- for some ungodly reason. The embedded page doesn't render when opened in another tab, even though I'm not blocking any of its Javascript. Who made this design decision? This is awful.
zem 7y ago
"brooklyn"?!!! i'm guessing that one was the result of a very sparse data set rather than there actually being more than one dog named "brooklyn".
- yurivish 7y ago
  Looking at the 2016 data, there are 203 registered dogs named Brooklyn. Curiously, only 90 of them live in Brooklyn. Brooklyns: https://gist.github.com/yurivish/326f64c439176f6d55f8d5528f17b9dc https://gist.github.com/yurivish/326f64c439176f6d55f8d5528f1... You can find the full dataset here: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Dataset/nu7n-tubp https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Datas...
  - zem 7y ago
    wow, okay, i'm surprised :) seems like a weird dog name, even for a new yorker.
Kaibeezy 7y ago
TLDR: kids name dogs

49 points by yurivish 7y ago

leesalminen 7y ago

Very cool. I’ve always wanted to do this analysis with our company’s data set but never got around to it.

kiseleon 7y ago

The "Googly Eyes" button is a work of art.

hinkley 7y ago
I didn't know how much I needed that laugh just now.

danso 7y ago

Tangent: pet licensing data (which basically means dog licenses), particularly names and breeds, is always something I've wanted to analyze for fun, especially across jurisdictions, but always ends up being a huge data wrangling exercise. But MuckRock has a nice collection of completed public records requests for cities across America: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=pet+license&status=done&user-autocomplete=&agency-autocomplete=&jurisdiction-autocomplete=&projects-autocomplete=&tags-autocomplete=&has_embargo=&has_crowdfund=&minimum_pages=&date_range_0=&date_range_1=&file_types= https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=pet+license&status=done... For example, Houston's data is a 90MB Excel spreadsheet with more than a million rows, and includes columns like pet color and vaccination dates: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/houston-113/houston-tx-pet-licensing-data-40240/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/houston-113/houston-tx-pet-lice...

caymanjim 7y ago

My family had a German shepherd named "Duke" and a labrador named "Hershey". We're so predictable.

rolltiide 7y ago

Interesting how the Shibe Inu’s have Japanese names This is all New York data so why do you think that is? Seems more likely that people interested in Japan related things are buying and naming these dogs, less likely that it is Japanese owners, and nobody else is choosing these?

munificent 7y ago
I think the simpler observation is that it's a Japanese breed name, so they pick a name that fits that. If you look at many of the other breeds, the most common name is clearly a riff on the breed: Boxer -> Tyson (Chocolate) labrador -> Hershey Blue heeler -> Blue Jack Russell terrier -> Jack Chihuahua -> lots of Mexican names King Charles spaniel -> Charlie Pug -> Pugsly Dachshund (weiner dog) -> Nathan (brand of hot dogs) Boston terrier -> Buster (guessing this is because it's similar-sounding)
- onorton 7y ago
  You missed English Bulldog -> Winston
  - munificent 7y ago
    Ah, good one!

bjterry 7y ago

The breed names don't render in Firefox for some reason.

mbostock 7y ago
I sent Yuri a suggestion to fix this. (The problem is that Firefox doesn’t resolve relative links from the textPath to the path element because of the page’s base element, so you need absolute links instead.)
- yurivish 7y ago
  Just merged — thanks!

dbatten 7y ago

This is broken for me in both Firefox for Android and Chrome for Windows. Any ideas what might be up?

yurivish 7y ago
Mike Bostock suggested a code fix that I've just merged! Does it help?
sli 7y ago
The entire article is embedded external content with only a script tag -- all embedded in an iframe -- for some ungodly reason. The embedded page doesn't render when opened in another tab, even though I'm not blocking any of its Javascript. Who made this design decision? This is awful.

zem 7y ago

"brooklyn"?!!! i'm guessing that one was the result of a very sparse data set rather than there actually being more than one dog named "brooklyn".

yurivish 7y ago
Looking at the 2016 data, there are 203 registered dogs named Brooklyn. Curiously, only 90 of them live in Brooklyn. Brooklyns: https://gist.github.com/yurivish/326f64c439176f6d55f8d5528f17b9dc https://gist.github.com/yurivish/326f64c439176f6d55f8d5528f1... You can find the full dataset here: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Dataset/nu7n-tubp https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Datas...
- zem 7y ago
  wow, okay, i'm surprised :) seems like a weird dog name, even for a new yorker.

Kaibeezy 7y ago

TLDR: kids name dogs