Rap Regions takes a look at the origins of rap and hip hop artists from the late ‘70s to 2005. The information on the map displays the artist's origin city, region, subgenre, when they got started in the industry and a link to their music on Spotify Web Player.
My name is Arissa Brown, senior web development student at the University of Central Florida. This idea originally spawned from my need to come up with a compelling topic for my Digital Humanities class.
I felt it would be very interesting to visualize where sub-genres of hip hop emerged geographically. Since I haven’t lived anywhere else except Florida, I’m extremely familiar with artists from the Dirty South region (Trick Daddy, Trina, Uncle Luke, etc) and mainstream names from other regions. However, I felt I didn't know too much more about other prolific artists who have contributed to the evolution of rap.
All the data about the artists were collected by me and entered into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then imported into a MySQL database and turned into a JSON file using PHP.
Data colected:
As I gathered information, I took note of any interesting facts which can be found here.
I want this to become a useful tool for those interested in the origins of rap so I am making this project open source in the hopes that others are willing to expand on it. Check out the source on GitHub to see how you can contribute.
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