This is the third of five posts on History 100S: Text Analysis for Digital Humanists ans Social Scientists, a Spring 2017 course taught by Laura Nelson that exposed UC Berkeley students to cutting edge computational text analysis techniques. In this post we focus on a collaborative project executed by Gabija Safranavicius and Alvin Ghouas entitled The Evolution of Modern Hip Hop.
The project applies topic modeling and dictionary methods to a text analysis of song lyrics to explore how themes in rap and hip hop music have changed since entering the mainstream in the early 1990s. Specifically, the authors consider if and how lyrical content pivots away from the iteration of black American experiences, to more conventional themes such as love, sex, fame, and status.
The authors stress that this project is intended to function as an exploratory analysis. The suggested sociological events relayed in the analysis are hypothetical, and must be further researched before making any confident claims as to their definite influence on rap and hip-hop lyrics.
Check out Gabija and Alvin’s notebook to learn more: https://github.com/gabisafra/evolution-of-modern-hip-hop
Posts in this series:
Text Analysis for Digital Humanists and Social Scientists, Part 1: Introduction
Text Analysis for Digital Humanists and Social Scientists, Part 3: The Evolution of Modern Hip Hop
Text Analysis for Digital Humanists and Social Scientists, Part 5: Text Encoding and Decoding
