http://bit.ly/17NZHcD

The map shows the distribution of the top three surnames by area using the electoral register. In addition to this, Twitter account surnames have also been included. Surnames are coloured according to their cultural, ethnic and linguistic origin according to the Onomap name classification

The results show a marked difference between the two data sources, with Twitter names diverging from national and regional stereotypes. In the general population (electoral register), Smith dominates in England, Jones in Wales, while Scotland is dotted with Campbells and Robertsons. Switch to Twitter, and many more non-British names appear in these areas.

The map has received attention from various newspaper media:

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2013/apr/22/popular-surnames-great-britain-mapped

Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2313590/The-interactive-map-reveals-Britains-popular-surnames.html

Evening Standard

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/techandgadgets/londons-mostused-surnames-revealed-in-interactive-map-8586395.html

Buckingham Helard

http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/local-news/smith-and-khan-top-chart-of-aylesbury-s-most-popular-surnames-1-5031576

Bristol Post

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Welsh-English-surnames-equal-measure-Bristol/story-18789870-detail/story.html

Nouvelles de France (France)

http://www.ndf.fr/identite/24-04-2013/immigration-les-listes-electorales-et-twitter-nous-disent-tout

Pablo Mateos and Jorge Durand

Access to a nationality from a European union (EU) country has become a key migration strategy for people from outside the eu and their families. This paper explores access to Spanish citizenship, through an innovative methodology, “netnography”. We analyzed an internet discussion group (41 000 posts and 2 860 individuals), where migrants share their concerns about the cumbersome Spanish naturalization process. We identify a series of strategies to access Spanish citizenship that seek to maximize the possibilities given by residence experience in Spain or Spanish ancestry (a sort of family endowment that we call “ethnic capital” here). These factors create an unequal pattern in the “geography of naturalization”,
marked by the history of Spanish emigration and immigration policies, woven together in the complex web of the personal experiences of migrants, who are constantly faced with the question: residence or ancestry?

Mateos, P., and Durand, J. (2012) Residence vs. ancestry in acquisition of Spanish citizenship; A ‘netnography’ approach. Migraciones Internacionales, 6 (4), 9-46

http://www2.colef.mx/migracionesinternacionales/revistas/MI23/01-MI23-9-46.pdf

Our forenames and surnames are connected into distinct global networks of cultural, ethnic and linguistic communities. These are revealed for the first time y a team of geographers in a paper published in Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) 

Mateos, P., Longley, P.A. and O’Sullivan, D. (2011) Ethnicity and Population Structure in Personal Naming Networks. PloS ONE (Public Library of Science) 6 (9) e22943 [article]

The network shows a selection of surnames in the city of Auckland (NZ)
using data from the 2006 Electoral Register. Each node represents a unique
surname and the links are common forenames shared between a surname pair.
The network’s topological structure reveals clear clustering in Auckland’s
naming practices, reflecting closely-knit social networks and ethno-cultural
customs that prevent cross-cultural (fore-)naming. For example the bottom third
of the figure contains a subnetwork of names that are Tongan, Samoan and other
Pacific Islanders. The full version of this network including the actual surnames
can be visualized in an online version available at http://www.onomap.org/
naming-networks/fig2.aspx: this Figure can be navigated with full panning and
zooming capabilities for flexible exploration. For more details on how the
network was built see Mateos et al. 2011.

Figure: A naming network built from publicly available telephone directories and population registers

The apparently innocent decision of naming a newborn baby anywhere in the world, actually hides a heavy cultural baggage reflecting social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations.

Through extensive academic research in 17 countries collecting the names of 118 million individuals in telephone directories and electoral registers, a team of Geographers at University College London and the University of Auckland reveal for the first time how ‘naming networks’ of forenames and surnames provide a valuable representation of cultural, ethnic and linguistic population structure around the world.

Dr. Pablo Mateos, Lecturer at Department of Geography in University College London (UCL) who led the research, says: “what really stroke us was to find clusters of social and ethno-cultural communities that simply ‘emerge’ from the aggregation of millions of individual parental decisions on giving names to their children across the world, without introducing any prior knowledge about a name’s origins”.

This article clearly shows that the way in which we choose our names is far from random, rather reflecting stark identity affiliations, geographical origins and social strata even in today’s highly interconnected world.

This innovative method of community assignment helps to reveal the degree of isolation, integration or overlap between population groups in our rapidly globalising world. As such, this work has important implications for research in population genetics, public health, and social science adding new understandings of migration, identity, integration and social interaction across the world.

More information:

Full paper:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022943

Navigable networks:

http://www.onomap.org/naming-networks/fig1.aspx

http://www.onomap.org/naming-networks/fig2.aspx

Human Biology is the official publication of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics (AAAG). It publishes multidisciplinary articles on human biology and evolution with an anthropological focus.  It has proved as a very successful forum for interdisciplinary work on the fields of human population genetics, evolutionary and genetic demography, quantitative genetics, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA studies, biological anthropological and cultural diversity inferred from linguistic variability, ethnological diversity, archaeological evidence, etc.).

Pablo’s work on the geography of names and ethnicity has attracted the attention of population geneticists in various countries and following invitations to present at several interdisciplinary conferences in this area he has now been invited to join the editorial board of Human Biology (2010-2014). His work on the geography and ethnicity of people’s names has focussed on challenging established myths about human group identity and the consequences of contemporary migration flows for population structure over space, in particular developing applications in ethnic inequalities in health and residential segregation in several countries.

http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/editorialboard.html

The February 2011 issue of National Geographic (page 22-23) includes a double spread with this innovative map of the US most common surnames by State

An on-line version of the map and article is available at:

http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2011/01/whats-in-a-surname.html

“What’s in a Surname? A new view of the United States based on the distribution of common last names shows centuries of history and echoes some of America’s great immigration sagas. To compile this data, geographers at University College London used phone directories to find the predominant surnames in each state. Software then identified the probable provenances of the 181 names that emerged.

Many of these names came from Great Britain, reflecting the long head start the British had over many other settlers. The low diversity of names in parts of the British Isles also had an impact. Williams, for example, was a common name among Welsh immigrants—and is still among the top names in many American states.

But that’s not the only factor. Slaves often took their owners’ names, so about one in five Americans now named Smith are African American. In addition, many newcomers’ names were anglicized to ease assimilation. The map’s scale matters too. “If we did a map of New York like this,” says project member James Cheshire, “the diversity would be phenomenal”—a testament to that city’s role as a once-and-present gateway to America. —A. R. Williams”

The data derive from a UCL research project titled “Worldnames”. More information and worldwide coverage of surnames at:

This seminar evaluated evidence on immigrant spatial concentration in Europe and its alleged effects on social integration, focusing on issues of measurement in the UK, Netherlands, France and Spain.

Pablo Mateos talked about his work on names and ethnicity as an alternative method to study residential segregation in various countries. The rest of the speakers were highly established Geographers working on segregation: Prof. Ceri Peach (Oxford), Prof. Ron Johnston (Univ. of Bristol), and Prof. Sako Musterd (Univ. of Amstedarm)

More information: http://www.geopolitique.net/index/francais/news/181

The conference title was “The Essence of the Urban”, and it attempted to discuss questions about scholarly questions emanating from the changing form and role of cities  and about the analytical focus of the Urban Studies discipline.  Central questions discussed were What is the role of the “urban” in today’s society and how should urban scholars approach this core concept in their academic endeavors?

To explore these questions, this conference was structured into three plenary sessions that chart an evolution from the theoretical underpinnings of the urban, to a greater understanding of ‘how’ we can study cities, and finally to practical applications in a pluriform society.

Neil Brenner (New York University) / James Sidaway (Univ. of Amsterdam)- Theory
Pablo Mateos (University College London) – Methodolgoy
Maarten Hajer (University of Amsterdam) – Policy

Pablo’s talk was titled “Digital cities and volunteered geographies: Innovative methods in urban studies” (download presentation)

More information about the conference:

Selected media features 2006-2008

2008  ‘Website maps surnames worldwide” BBC News, 30 Aug http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7588968.stm

2008   “Putting you on the map: the website that pinpoints where your name is in the world’ The Independent 30 Aug http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/putting-you-on-the-map-the-website-that-pinpoints-where-your-name-is-in-the-world-913312.html

2008 ‘Global surname website launched’ Channel 4 News, 30 Aug

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/global+surname+website+launched/2438237

2008  ‘Mapping London’s immigration’ BBC News, 27 March http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7315460.stm

2007  ‘The 50 most common British surnames, by postal town‘ The Observer 18 Apr.  http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Observer/documents/2007/04/18/observer_surnames.pdf

2007  ‘Britain’s moving story’ The New Statesman, 15 January http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2007/01/cornish-names-british-family

2007   ‘Website focus on surnames’, Practical Family History magazine, February (110) p. 64-65

2006   ‘The Global Geography of Surnames”, Geographical: The magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, November, v. 78 (11) p. 12

2006   ‘The name game: How to trace your surname across the globe’, The Times, 31 August, front cover and p.5 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article623423.ece

2006   ‘Riddle of the most travelled Britons’, The Independent, 31 August, p.10

2006   ‘How British names conquered the world’, Daily Telegraph, 31 August, p. 4

2006   ‘Most adventurous surnames mapped’ BBC News on-line, 31 August.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5301032.stm

2006   ‘End of the innuendo’, The Guardian, news blog, 31 August.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/08/31/end_of_the_innuendo.html

2006   ‘Name check reveals a new pecking order’, The Sunday Times, 4 June, p.8

2005   ‘Team find sickly postcodes’, report in Camden New Journal, 17 July, p. 17.

2005   ‘This sceptered aisle: Tesco is successful chiefly because it understands Britain. But it is also changing the place’, The Economist, 4 August, p. 23

Press Coverage in August-September 2008, after the launch of WorldNames website:

http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/

BBC Online – [link]
BBC Radio 4 – [link] and [link]
The Independent [link]
Channel4 news – [link]
Telegraph – [link]
The Scotsman – [link]
The Press Association [link]
New Zealand Herald – [link]
SG.HU (Hungary)- [link]
ZDNet.de (Germany)- [link]
Telekom Presse (Austria) – [link]
Presstext (Germany)[link]
Globo (Brazil) – [link]
Yahoo News Hong Kong (Hong Kong) – [link]
Saigon Giai Phong Online (Vietnam) – [link]
News.com.au (Australia) [link]
Mbl.is (Iceland) [link]
Computerwoche.de (Germany) [link]
WebUser – [link]
Worthing Herald – [link]
Portugal Diario – [link]
The Dominion Post – [link]

Press Coverage in 2006, after the launch of GB Surname Profiler website:

http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/

Pablo Mateos participates in a successful CASA-led £2.9 million bid to EPSRC involving seven UCL departments and ten academics.

ENFOLD is a multidisplinary five year modelling project funded by EPSRC (£2.9 million FEC) spanning across seven UCL departments. It will develop new forms of complexity science which address the most difficult of human problems: those that involve global change where there is no organised constituency and whose agencies are largely regarded as being ineffective. ENFOLD will argue that global systems tend to be treated in isolation from one another and that the unexpected dynamics that characterises their behaviour is due to their coupling and integration that is all too often ignored. To demonstrate these dynamics and to develop appropriate policy responses, it will study four related global systems: trade, migration, security and development aid. It will develop integrated and coupled models whose dynamics can be described in the not so conventional language of complexity theory: chaos, turbulence, bifurcations, catastrophes, and phase transition. The programme will apply spatial interaction models to trade and migration, reaction diffusion to conflicts and terrorism, and network models to international trade, migration and crime. These models will be extended to incorporate the generation of qualitative new events such as the emergence of new entities e.g. countries, coupling them together in diverse ways. We will ultimately develop a generic framework for a coupled global dynamics that spans many spatial and temporal scales and pertains to different systems whose behaviours can be simulated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Various models will be developed which incorporate all these ideas into a global intelligence system to inform global policy makers about future events. Several UK government departments as well as global businesses are partners in this project.

The project is led by Sir Alan Wilson at CASA. Dr. Pablo Mateos is one of the co-investigators and will lead the migration strand of the project, based at the Migration Research Unit. Professor John Salt will be an adviser to the project.

• Professor Sir Alan Wilson FBA, FRS (CASA), PI
• Professor Mike Batty CBE, FBA, FRS (CASA)
• Professor Frank Smith FRS (Mathematics)
• Professor Stephen Bishop (Mathematics)
• Dr Francesca Medda (Transport Studies)
• Dr Pablo Mateos (Geography)
• Dr Alex Braithwaite (Political Science)
• Dr Alastair Turner (Political Science)
• Dr Shane Johnson (Jill Dando Institute)
• Dr Sean Hanna (Bartlett School)

More details

A research collaboration in urban and population geography has recently being set up between Dr. Pablo Mateos (UCL) and Dr. Adrian Guillermo Aguilar, at the Mexico National University (UNAM), one of the the most prestigious university in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. The aim is to develop further studies of study socioeconomic segregation in Latin American cities.

Following earlier contacts, Pablo visited UNAM’s Institute of Geography in Mexico City for a week in April 2009, where he gave a seminar on ‘Spatial Analysis, Geodemographics and Residential Segregation’, showcasing various UCL research projects and introducing the collaboration with UNAM. He also initiated the research project by analysing Census data for Mexico City at very small area level. His visit was partly funded by UNAM’s international collaboration funds.

Adrian Guillermo will visit UCL for a month in May 2009, where he will be working with Pablo Mateos, various members of CASA, Dr Ann Varley and other human geographers in the department. He will give a departmental seminar on his work in Mexico City and the research project with UCL. His visit is funded by a Spatial Literacy in Teaching (SPLINT) Fellowship. (See: http://www.spatial-literacy.org/)

This collaboration will establish opportunities for the dissemination of UCL and UNAM’s research in urban and population geography, including publications. Medium-term funding will also be sought to carry out a broader three year research project.