Data Products Course Project: Top Baby Names from 1880 to 2015

Paul W
September 17, 2016

Overview

My application uses data from the Social Security Adminstration (SSA) on the top baby names from 1880 to 2015.

This data from the SSA can be found here: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-security-card-applications-national-level-data.

My app can be found at the following link: https://paulw.shinyapps.io/Shiny_App/

The source code for my app, including the ui.R and server.R files, are available in this Github repo: https://github.com/pwachtler/DataProductsAssignment

App Description

My application allows a user to navigate the baby name data.

There are three values that can be selected by a user:

  • Gender: Male or Female
  • Year: Any Year Between 1880 and 2015
  • First Letter: The First Letter of the Baby Names (this field is optional)

The top 10 baby names that meet the criteria selected by the user are displayed in a table.

The table values are updated dynamically whenever the user changes one of the three selected input values.

Data Processing Code

The baby name data from the SSA is contained in separate folders.

Each year between 1880 and 2015 has its own folder of baby names.

In order to create a single dataset to use for my app, I created a script called ReadingNames.R.

This script read all of the baby names from each folder into a single .txt file called babyNames.txt, which I used as the dataset for my app.

The ReadingNames script I created can be found here: https://github.com/pwachtler/DataProductsAssignment/blob/master/ReadingNames.R

Top Baby Name Data

To demonstrate how my app works, below is the output that's displayed if a user selects the following:

  • Gender: Female
  • Year: 2000
  • First Letter: 'C'
        name sex count
1:     Chloe   F 7,094
2:  Courtney   F 5,239
3:  Caroline   F 5,021
4: Christina   F 4,325
5:   Caitlin   F 4,102
6: Catherine   F 3,800