The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods

A recent workshop entitled The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications

A 'Kees' study on nominal record linkage

This paper describes a case study on nominal record linkage on data from the Mandemakers family. It is demonstrated how names from birth, marriage and death certificates can be used for fast, probabilistic, ego-based record linkage, with the help of year of birth to arrive at unique identification. The procedure includes name standardization to overcome variation in spelling and the use of probabilities of combinations of given names and surnames, computed from the digitized 19th century Dutch vital register

Exploring co-variation in the (historical) Dutch civil registration

Abstract The civil registration (CR) contains a wealth of information on inhabitants of a country; their names, their dates-, places-and countries of birth, marriage and decease, with links to partners and children. From the onomastic point of view this is one of the best sources one can have for very many research questions. Availability of the data from civil registration is a problem, however, for privacy reasons for the modern CR, and for lack of digitized data from the historic CR. In the Netherlands, much progress has been made in recent years: full population selections (for 16 million inhabitants) from the CR came available for scientific research on the basis of a new law on the CR, separately for first names and surnames. In 2010, websites were launched, based on these data: the Dutch Corpus of First Names (www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb) with 500.000 names and the Dutch Family Names Corpus (www.meertens.knaw/nl/nfb) with 314.000 names. The sites show first name popularity per gender from 1880 onwards, family name figures for 1947 and 2007, name distribution maps at the municipality level, name explanations (partly) and other documentation. For the historical CR, certificates of birth, marriage and death from 1811 onwards are being indexed and digitized by hundreds of volunteers, half of the job being currently done (16 million certificates). A project on record linkage aims to reconstruct families from these data to built a historic CR. A typical property of a source like the CR is the information network it consists of. The relations among people are explicitly present, as partners, as a family, as inhabitants of some village, as born in some year, and so on. This opens new ways for onomastic research based on co-variation. The names of children in the same family inform us on specific parental preferences, the spatial distribution of names on regional influences in naming and migration, the first names in different generations in a family on dynamics in naming over time, family reconstruction processes (needed to create the historical CR) can learn us about spelling and name variation for the same person, and so on. All these analyses start at the very detailed personal level, but can be aggregated to demonstrate societal processes. Several examples of this kind of studies are presented

Evaluation of the Bayesian Method to Derive Migration Patterns from Changes in Surname Distributions over Time

Known migration in The Netherlands between the periods 1950– 1969 and 2007, for 4.5 million individuals, was used to estimate the origin of migration by means of a Bayesian method on the basis of surname distributions in these two periods. Results of the method depend on the geographic specificity of the surnames and tend to be positioned between population density and actual probability of migration origin. An optimum in the correlation between estimated and actual percentages of origin of migration, and their differentiation as expressed by the correlation between the estimated and actual entropy across 40 distinguished areas, was found after a few iterations. The optimal correlation was 0.806 (Spearman), which shows that the Bayesian method provides a reasonable proxy of the rank order of a migrant’s origin

Qualities of a voice emeritus

The effects of vocal ageing are investigated in a professional mezzo-soprano singer, for which the phonetogram, and 45 vowels, each sung at fundamental frequencies of 220, 392, and 659 Hz, were recorded at the age of 52 and 74 years. The comparison demonstrates a serious loss in the vocal range, dynamics and control: (1) a loss of half an octave in the highest fundamental frequency range, (2) a loss of 6 dB at the highest vocal intensities, (3) less accuracy in targeting of F0, (4) no significant change in average vibrato frequency, but (5) much more instability in vibrato frequency and less vibrato modulation depth. The analysis of vocal vibrato is realized with a new method that allows computation of instantaneous vibrato frequency and extent (modulation depth)

A 'Kees' study on nominal record linkage

This paper describes a case study on nominal record linkage on data from the Mandemakers family. It is demonstrated how names from birth, marriage and death certificates can be used for fast, probabilistic, ego-based record linkage, with the help of year of birth to arrive at unique identification. The procedure includes name standardization to overcome variation in spelling and the use of probabilities of combinations of given names and surnames, computed from the digitized 19th century Dutch vital register

Perception And Acoustics Of Emotions In Singing

In this experiment, the acoustic correlates of perceived emotions in singing were investigated. Singers were instructed to sing one phrase in a neutral way and in the emotions anger, joy, fear, and sadness. Listeners rated the strength of the perceived emotions for each fragment. Principal component analyses were performed on the listeners' ratings. The derived factors were interpreted as listening strategies; and a listener's factor loading as an indicator of the extent to which that listener used that strategy. Using the original ratings and the factor loadings, the phrases were assigned composite ratings for each emotion. Acoustic measures of spectral balance, vibrato, duration and intensity were related to the composite ratings using multiple regression analyses. It was found that anger was associated with the presence of vibrato; joyous phrases had vibrato, a short final duration, and a shallow spectral slope; sadness was associated with absence of vibrato, long duration, and a lo..