This repository contains the list of New York Times wedding announcements used in an Upshot story on name changes among women who marry. The CSV file contains the URL of the announcement, status of the bride's name and the ages of the celebrants, if available.
To analyze The Times data, we compiled the text of 7,835 opposite-sex wedding announcements published in several different years: 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2014. The 1985 data covered only the final four months of that year, and The Times did not publish the ages of celebrants in announcements during that period.
To identify women's name decisions, we searched for common phrases such as "the bride will be keeping her name" or "will be taking her husband’s name." The announcement texts were relatively consistent, using many of the same phrases year after year, but some variations were evident. Those announcements that did not contain immediately obvious indicators of preference were then examined in more detail to see how the bride was described on subsequent references in the text. For example, a typical second reference might say "Mrs. Jones," where Jones was the groom's surname, or "Ms. Parker," where Parker matched the bride’s surname. These records were marked accordingly.
About one in five announcements in each year examined gave no clear indication of name preference. In these announcements the bride typically was referenced only as "the bride" after her full name was printed. We counted these records as "unclear."
To analyze the data, we used an internal API to collect the text of announcements, loaded them into a PostgreSQL database and then used both SQL and the Ruby gem String Eater to identify and isolate patterns that would help determine the name status. Full methodology for the story here.