I started this blog to practice text mining and spacial analysis. These next two posts will help me practice.

For a simple text mining exercise, I thought I’d look at the most common first names of runners who ran the Rock the Parkway half marathon, the first race of the Heartland 39.3 Half Marathon series.

Male First Names Female First Names

I wasn’t too surprised by the top names – this was a race in the midwestern United States, and the top names follow common European names. (My first name, as vanilla as they come, was tied for first place – at least I came in first place somehow :p )

To make things a bit more interesting, I thought I’d next drill down and look at the distribution of first letters of the first names:

Male First Letters Female First Letters

While I knew that my first name was extremely common, I didn’t realize that “J” names, especially “J” names for males, were so popular. (Top first-letters for female names – “A”, “J”, “K”, “M”, and “S”, or at least “A”, “M”, and “S” – were less surprising.)