The most popular people names for dogs
An interactive tool showing readers whether their name is more dog or more human, plus an exploration of human names given to dogs on Petfinder.
Department of Data YouTube short / Award of Excellence from the Society for News Design
Data collection, data analysis, research, writing, and static visualizations by Alyssa Fowers; interactive visualization by Chris Alcantara
I scraped data on all of the adoptable dogs on Petfinder for this story. My analysis started by looking at the most common names for dogs of different sizes and colors, but lightning really struck when colleague Andrew Van Dam suggested that I compare the dog names to human names from the Social Security Administration. More than a million people viewed the story in 2022, and it was one of the top 5 graphics for subscriptions starts and pageviews that year. Every six months or so, it reemerges due to the charming social share design by Chris Alcantara or highlights from YouTubers. I treasure my memory of calling animal shelters to ask why they named their dogs Mary (cross-eyed like the Jethro Tull song) and Michael (named after someone who worked at the shelter).
