Raymon Shi
COMM313
May 7, 2021
Final Project
For my Computational Text Analysis Final Project, I wanted to explore the evolution of one of my favorite rappers' music. Quadeca is an American rapper who amassed a large portion of his audience from his presence on YouTube. Back in 2018, he had an internet beef with KSI which lead to the creation of one of the most iconic YouTube diss tracks called Insecure. Published on November 23, 2018, this diss track currently has over 34.8 million views and 840,000 likes. With the amount of attention this video got, I thought that it was a pretty huge turning point in Quadeca's music career. This inspired the guiding questions for this project, which are: "Did Quadeca's music change between the period before the Insecure diss track and the period after the Insecure diss track?" and "Did the success of Quadeca's Insecure diss track influence his music to sound more like mainstream music?".
In order to achieve the goal of answering my questions, I started by collecting lyrical data via the usage of the LyricsGenius Python API. This API helped scrape lyrics of songs that existed on the lyrics website Genius.com. Afterward, I performed a series of word frequency and n-gram frequency lists analysis, keyness analysis, keyword in context concordance analysis, and sentiment analysis.
All the data collection related activity is stored in the data folder. All the computational text data analysis is stored in the data_analysis folder. The final blog post can be found in the final_data_story folder.