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.

I’m digging into my process of collecting and organizing meaningful Black names, whether that’s from scraping Wikipedia pages or studying the US Census.
I originally started these lists with the question of “What are the characteristics of diasporic African American names and how do they compare with African names versus colonizer/ European-American names?”

Or in short,

“What makes a Black name Black?”