an article by Pablo Mateos (Dept of Geography, University College London) published in BURISA (journal of the British Urban & Regional Information Systems Association) Number 181 (September 2009)
Abstract
A team of geographers at University College London's Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis a new methodology to analyse the ethnicity and geography of people's names across the globe. Onomap provides an innovative way of classifying any list of names into common cultural, ethnic and linguistic groups based on combinations of surnames and forenames.
Hazel’s comment:
I am amazed. This is a stunning piece of work since it takes the guess-work out of “where do they live?”.
You will, of course, still have to work out for yourselves whether it is sensible to provide careers advice in any of the principal Nigerian languages in the eastern boroughs of London where there is a large concentration of people with Nigerian names or if you should be concentrating on Polish (which does have the advantage of being a single language) in areas of London where 45% of the population was recorded at the 2001 Census in the “White Other” ethnic group but the maximum percentage of Polish is 3.15%.
Personal anecdote: when my grand-daughters were at school in Hackney (which appears to be the epicentre of the Polish population in East London according to Onomap) there were 68 different first languages being spoken. You cannot, with the best will in the world, cater for all of these from a limited budget for guidance.
PS. The family has now moved into LB of Enfield. Not, I hasten to add, primarily for education reasons but because of the crime-ridden locality.
Further information is available at:
info@onomap.org
Links:
http://www.onomap.org/
http://www.londonprofiler.org/
http://www.publicprofiler/worldnames.org
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment