Re: Surname Profiler porject

Eve McLaughlin wrote:
> Surely - tin miners migrating, after Wheels worked out, to other mining
> areas. Well known historical fact. Is this not a History Dept which is
> involved?
>
Yes, we are aware of the reasons - I was simply giving an example, and
even knowing the reasons it is still interesting to look at whether you
can statistically measure migration in this way. Another example we
looked at was whether you could see the typical origins and
destinations of people migrating (either forced or voluntarily) to
Australia. So do the surnames in, say Victoria, have closer
associations with different parts of Britain, for instance.


>
> Does tend to make it useless for some purposes and misleading for
> others. If, e.g. 99 individuals called Fanackapan are still in area A,
> the system will imply that every Fanackapan has upped stakes and gone.
> Whereas is one more baby had been born, their presence would have been
> revealed.

Yes, we acknowledge this fact, and acknowledge that it was a mistake,
but as it was a decision we made right at the very begining of the
project it was too late to go back and correct it once we got started.

>
> But if it is not as useful a tool as Steve Archer's, why use it? This
> adds to the concerns about the dumbing down of academic standards/
>
Don't use it, if you don't want to. To be honest, it is neither
here-nor-there to us if no one does.

As I keep repeating (and some people seem to be unable to grasp) the
point of the project was NOT to build a website. We spent a year
analysing name patterns using geographical and statistical tools and
skills. At the end of this, one thing we thought might be fun and
interesting would be to make a small part of the data and analysis we
did available to the public. This was the purpose of the website -
simply to disseminate some pieces of the research to people outside of
academia.

Quite frankly, I find your claim of "dumbing down of academic
standards" quite insulting. Research funding from the British
Research Councils (ESRC in this case) is not easy to get, and they
require high standards of application and production. What you are
seeing here is a very small part of our work, and is, if you have
failed to notice, a free resource. Some people will have access to
better paid-for packages (but even those do not have all the statistics
we offer), but many people have a small amount of interest in their
name, but not enough to want to pay for it. Criticism of the website is
fine - it is not perfect, we accept that, and we never intended it to
be the greatest surname site every, but criticising academic research
when you have not actually seen the proper research is rather silly and
blinkered.

As it has had 240,000 unique visitors, 500,000 separate visits and 4.25
million page impressions since last Sunday clearly enough people are
finding it useful in some ways.

Daryl

.

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