What's In a Name? Data Linkage, Demography and Visual Analytics

Abstract

This work explores the development of a visual analytics tool for geodemographic exploration in an online environment. We mine 78 million records from the United States public telephone directories, link the location data to demographic data (specifically income) from the United States Census Bureau, and allow users to interactively compare distributions of names with regards to spatial location similarity and income. In order to enable interactive similarity exploration, we explore methods of pre-processing the data as well as on-the-fly lookups. As data becomes larger and more complex, the development of appropriate data storage and analytics solutions has become even more critical when enabling online visualization. We discuss problems faced in implementation, design decisions and directions for future work.