This is the repo hosting the final project for CS109a for the below members. Our TF is Crystal, and our project is Baby Names.

• Raynor Kuang
• Judson Woods
• Julia Argy
• Ezinne Nwankwo

Transformations of culture and society are very debated topics. People could express different opinions on it however it is very difficult to give quantitative description. One challenge for this is that it is not easy to find the appropriate metric to measure such general and evasive concepts. A strategy to tackle this issue is to use particular features of human activities. In this project, we want to use the names of babies born in the United States to explore social and culture transformations in United States. This is an open-ended question and you are free to answer as you see fit.

1. PROJECT SELECTION: Form teams of 2 or 3 and select a project from the provided list.
2. LITERATURE STUDY: Go through the following resources for background on the project and write a half to one-page summary for each one (availablein Harvard online library http://hollis.harvard.edu/):
3. Twenge, Jean M., Emodish M. Abebe, and W. Keith Campbell. "Fitting in or standing Out: Trends in American parents' choices for children’s names, 1880–2007." Social Psychological and Personality Science 1.1 (2010): 19-25.
4. Barucca, Paolo, et al. "Cross-correlations of American baby names."Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.26 (2015): 7943-7947.
5. DATA EXPLORATION AND CLEANING: The data for this project is from Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/kaggle/us-baby-names Perform the following exploration steps:
6. Can you identify any limitations or distortions of the data?
7. What is the most popular name of all time? (Of either gender.)
8. What is the most gender ambiguous name in 2013? 1945?
9. Of the names represented in the data, find the name that has had the largest percentage increase in popularity since 1980. Largest decrease?
10. Can you identify names that may have had an even larger increase or decrease in popularity?
11. PROPOSAL: Propose methodologies and ideas to be implemented and interpreted for your final project. Feel free to use other publicly available datasets. This is an open-ended question and you are free to answer as you see fit.
12. Decide the topic of your project. (What specific cultural/social changes you want to explore? i.e. changes in gender ambiguity, pop culture, immigration rate and etc.)
13. Methods and Models
14. Visualization and Interpretation