Project description:

Our team tried to think about the impact of cultural and political issues on choosing name to newborn children. We made the hypothesis on this and with help of open data and visualization tools found out that yes, culture and politics has straight impact on choosing name to newborns. 

Impact reached:

Among journalists this article became so popular even local TV chanel asked for interview. But at the same time it is very interesting because every person has a name so this topic is really for everyone. People understood that their names are not special and their parents was just following the trends. For exmaple for now we can show some actions of Islamization in Central Asia region. How we can describe it? I don’t know but that’s the fact. And among all of the negative news this reliable and at the same time funny article based on data makes people think about it and understand that they may be under impact of some manipulations but they even don’t know about this. Of course, after reading this article they going to be more sceptic about everything and I hope they will check information and try to be more objective. 

Techniques/technologies used:

We used government open data which I think we can rely on. Because there is no need to manipulate with this data. We used excel to clean the data and rarely google sheets’ tools for cleaning. After making flat table we got the cleanest data that we can use for visualization. Mostly we used Flourish. For free I can do there almost everything. Living in Kazakhstan and generally being from Cetral Asia is quite uncomfortable for getting data or for access some services. But floursh is for everyone and for free. 

What was the hardest part of this project?

Of course the hardest thing was to find the idea and to work with data. But I enjoyed it. At this moment we didn’t know about scraping so we are proud of ourselves for making such interesting content with using minimum skills with working with data.

What can others learn from this project?

May be vizualization. And searching tools for google. And short ways to use them. 

Project links:

factcheck.kz/socium/aleksandr-vs-aruzhan-istoriya-kazaxstana-v-imenax-novorozhdyonnyx/