Hip Hop Vocabulary

This post originally came out in 2014 (before this blog was created) and so I hadn't thought about it for a while. Then I saw a post by Dane Ehlert on his When Math Happens blog and was not only reminded of it but noticed that the original post had been updated in look and with new data. Basically they take a pile of hip hop artists and count how many unique words they use in their first 35000 lyrics.

Analysis

When you go to the site, the visualization (above) is interactive in that you can search for artists and interact with the visualization. This is neat but on this blog we typically want to do some mathematical analysis. They have other representations like this one that looks like a histogram but for our purposes, we would like some numbers.

 

So if you look way down on the post, they do have a Google Sheet with the number of unique words for each of the over 160 artists. It's not a particularly robust data set but we can do some simple
analysis, like histogram, averages, box plots and other single variable analysis. I don't think there is anything particularly mathematically interesting with the data but this is data that might be interesting for students and so it could be used to do practice some standard single variable analysis techniques (central tendance, standard deviation, distributions, dot plots, box plots, histograms etc)

Sample Questions

• Who are the outliers in this data set?
• Which decade has the most verbose rappers?
• How does your favourite rapper compare to the most/least verbose rapper?
• Take a look at some of the questions Dane was asking in his post for some more open questions.
• What does the data in the original post say about the amount of words used in different types of music?

Downloads 

• Original data:https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/
• Raw data (Google Sheets, CSV, Desmos, CODAP)

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.