Cross correlations of the American baby names
arXiv:1410.2771 · doi:10.1073/pnas.1507143112
Abstract
The quantitative description of cultural evolution is a challenging task. The most difficult part of the problem is probably to find the appropriate measurable quantities that can make more quantitative such evasive concepts as, for example, dynamics of cultural movements, behavior patterns and traditions of the people. A strategy to tackle this issue is to observe particular features of human activities, i.e. cultural traits, such as names given to newborns. We study the names of babies born in the United States of America from 1910 to 2012. Our analysis shows that groups of different correlated states naturally emerge in different epochs, and we are able to follow and decrypt their evolution. While these groups of states are stable across many decades, a sudden reorganization occurs in the last part of the twentieth century. We think that this kind of quantitative analysis can be possibly extended to other cultural traits: although databases covering more than one century (as the one we used) are rare, the cultural evolution on shorter time scales can be studied thanks to the fact that many human activities are usually recorded in the present digital era.
submitted for consideration to PNAS
References in corpus (8)
- Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact
- Novelty and Collective Attention
- High Dimensional Statistical Inference and Random Matrices
- A Simple Generative Model of Collective Online Behaviour
- Cross-Correlation Dynamics in Financial Time Series
- Random drift versus selection in academic vocabulary: an evolutionary analysis of published keywords
- Analyses of Baby Name Popularity Distribution in U.S. for the Last 131 Years
- Dynamics of fashion: The case of given names