Corpus text-mining tools can map brand frequency shifts across cultural texts.

Evidence

Returning to the Cristal affair that began this chapter, this securitization logic will be demonstrated with an analysis of alcohol branding in hip hop lyrics, showing how a broad market of speculative exchange was developed from the pool of individual lyrics. The digital tool being used here is the online service Rap Stats, a database of hip hop lyrics that allows users to query the corpus and compare the frequency of keywords and phrases. This application is similar to the Google Ngram Viewer, a web platform that allows users to keyword search Google’s five-million-plus, multi-language book corpus ranging back to the year 1500. There are multiple limitations to this type of technology and methodology; simple errors in optical character recognition or automating metadata, for instance, can skew results wildly, not to mention larger issues of what types of sources are included or not included in any corpus. For my purposes, as a humanist rather than a scientist, I’m not looking to use the Rap Stats data to conclusively prove anything, but to isolate small patterns with which questions can be asked and broader interpretations can be suggested. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 336

Categorization

• DEFINE: Rap Stats is explained as a hip hop lyric corpus tool analogous to Google Ngram Viewer, with explicit caveats about OCR noise and corpus selection bias.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader question of demonstrating causation vs. correlation; the author explicitly frames his use of the data as suggestive of patterns, not proof, which is a key methodological limit on the causal claims he makes.