Social science research moved from a color-blind approach back to color-consciousness. It’s important to know how the ethnicities are distributed in a dataset when doing social science research because if you don’t you might get results that only benefit the group of people that were most represented in the dataset and doesn’t recognize minorities. Therefore knowing ethnicities while doing research can help against or identify biased results.

I’ve co-authored a social-science + machine learning research paper about name-ethnicity classification. The paper is going to be released soon but you might be interested in our GitHub organization:

https://github.com/name-ethnicity-classifier

I’ve also developed a webapp but it’s currently down because of technical problems and I don’t have the time to properly maintain it.