Welcome to an innovative way of teaching and sharing the delights that comes when data, computational methods and culture collide. The goal of this lab is to connect cultural relevance to computing by introducing elementary techniques of natural language processing with a corpus of hip-hop data.

Art is something that we often believe that is separate from the so-called hard sciences. As a result, those of people who are gifted in the arts or are inclined in that direction, shy away from the sciences because many fall prey to the false choice of choosing between the arts or the sciences.

We want to change this false dichotomy by bringing the power of computational methods to investigate and explore the riches that are inherent in the arts. It is for this reason that we have chosen to use a corpus of hip-hop lyrics as the dataset on which we will practice our computational techniques. At the end of this lab you will be able to build a visualization of the occurence of certain words in a rap corpus.

One of the reasons why python is loved is that it is a language that lends itself well to things like building webapps as well as "hardcore" computational science like calculatings the orbits of planets and stuff like that. What we are interested in, is doing a bit of data manipulation based on a hip-hop corpus. We are going to be doing something similar to what Matt Daniels did with the hip-hop vocabulary. We are going to get under the hood and create our own hypothesis.