50,000 boat names

A smattering of boat names found in NOAA's Marine Cadastre data set. Source: NOAA. Visualization: Jon Keegan/Beautiful Public Data.In the vast ocean of government datasets that I trawl through, I am always on the lookout for moments where people express themselves, leaving behind their own little datum of personality. These tiny expressions of creativity show up all over public datasets. Air traffic controllers choose funny names for airplane navigation waypoints. Rejected vanity license plate registrations turn up in state motor vehicle databases. The names we pick for our dogs appear in local licensing databases, and the Social Security Administration even publishes the most popular names we give our children. And if you own a boat, you get to name that too. I went through several years’ worth of NOAA vessel traffic data and pulled a sample of more than 50,000 boat names that were broadcast via Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmitters, which are typically found on larger…