paper/paper.md

In cdcrabtree/nomine: Classify Names by Gender, U.S. Ethnicity, and Leaf Nationality

title: 'Nomine: Functions to classify names based on 6 U.S. ethnicities or 39 leaf nationalities.' tags: - name classifier - API access - ethnicity - nationality authors: - name: Charles Crabtree orcid: 0000-0001-5144-8671 affiliation: 1 - name: Volha Chykina orcid: 0000-0002-7612-9180 affiliation: 2 - name: Micah Gell-Redman orcid: 0000-0002-4427-0630 affiliation: 3 - name: Christian Chacua affiliation: 4 affiliations: - name: University of Michigan index: 1 - name: Pennsylvania State University index: 2 - name: University of Georgia index: 3 - name: University of Bordeaux index: 4 date: 7 October 2018 bibliography: paper.bib

Summary

Large social science literatures are devoted to examining the role of an individual's ethnicity or nationality on a host of behaviors and circumstances (e.g., [@Adida2016], [@Habyarimana2009], [@Hochschild1996], [@Mcconnaughy2010]). This means that researchers often want to know the ethnicities or nationalities of individuals. Not all pre-existing datasets contain this information, though, and it can be difficult for scholars to locate that data if they work with exotic samples. Even if reseachers do not have information about the ethnicity or nationality of individuals, though, they often know their names. Thanks to recent developments in machine learning, these names can be used to probabilistically identify the ethnic or national origins of their bearers. These exciting advancements can potentially catalyze existing research programs on race, ethnicity, and coethnicity.

Unfortunately, most of the available name classifiers are very costly to use. While some allow free access, they typically impose extremely restrictive limits on the number of names that can be classified in a period, such as 100 per month (see NamSor). One free tool with a generous limit is NamePrism [@Ye2017], a non-commercial program intended to support academic research. At the time of this writing, NamePrism provides users with an accessible web-based interface that can classify names one at a time. Researchers who want to classify more than one name at a time can, in theory, use the publicly available API. In contrast to other tools and services, NamePrism allows up to 60 API requests per minute.

In order to classify names in bulk, however, researchers would need to write code to automatically query the API. That could be a significant barrier to use, though, as many scholars likely lack the requisite programming experience. The nomine package addresses that problem by providing two functions that make the task of quering NameSor's API trivally easy. The first, get_ethnicities, takes a vector of names and returns a data frame that contains the predicted probability that each name bearer belongs to one of 6 U.S. ethnicities. The second, get_nationalities, performs the same function but for 39 lead nationalities instead. See http://name-prism.com/about for more information about the specific ethnicities and nationalities covered by NameSor.

References

cdcrabtree/nomine documentation built on May 31, 2019, 8:40 a.m.