Sound Bites

The Dallas Institute for the Humanities

Dallas, Texas

September 22, 2017

In this interactive listening session, I’ll be sharing a preview of an multi-modal essay I’m working on about the rapper. Over the last decade, scholars have conceived of the “digital humanities” as a way of extending the toolkits of traditional scholarship by using machine learning techniques to analyze literary art. Copyright laws and access to digitized sources, however, are a big hurdle to overcome when trying to conduct text mining experiments on traditional literature. In terms of hip hop, however, there is a large online community of people using technology to compile and organize rap lyrics, in far more advanced ways than in African American and American literature.