Our research began by selecting 10 songs from 12 various hip-hop artists, these artists included:
Each group member was given three artists with ten songs each, for 30 songs per group member, making 90 songs in all.
In order to mark up these songs and pull the essential information, we decided on tagging tone and mood for every intro, chorus, verse, bridge, interlude, and outro within a song. In order to maintain a sense of consistency throughout all 90 songs, the tone and mood attributes were signifigantly constrained. Mood could be tagged as any of the following: hopeful, energetic, cynical, apathetic, empathetic, determined, angry, sad, happy, confident, anxious, ambiguous. Tone was constrained to three: positive, negative, and neutral. In the insatance where a song had a featured artist that sang alone, which was quite frequent, the mood and tone attributes were set to "null," as we were not looking to analize anything that they sang or said because we were specifically looking for the tones and moods of the main artist. Tagging Topics Another essentail piece of information that we needed to isolate from the songs in order to help us track an artist's evolution over time was specifc topics that were being brought up throughout the lyrics. We decided on these such topics being: drugs, death, family, religion, money, poverty, wealth, violence, social issues, gangs, and ambiguous. Tagging topics would allow us to track how, as stated with our reseach question, an artists lyrical subject matter can evolve over time.
The process for the bar chart svg was a bit more complicated than anticipated. At first we were going to have a chart for each song for each artist, but that would mean we would have to fit ninety charts on a page. To fix this, we decided to make one chart per artist, comparing the tones of their early and late albums. To do this, we had to use the collection function. Camryn worked on this with Dr. Birnbaum as that in and of itself was a difficult and complicated process. Essentially, the collection function creates nine collections, which contains the lyrics for each artist we looked at. When the template is applied to hip:artist, the template runs over each artist collectively, giving us our data.