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Really interesting, but not as representative as it should be. It's not clear why some have larger vocabulary than others. It could be using words like "zeitgei
by krick 13y ago
Really interesting, but not as representative as it should be. It's not clear why some have larger vocabulary than others. It could be using words like "zeitgeist" (in case of Aesop Rock) or some clever wordplay (I don't know much about hip-hop, so I can't find example for some artist from the list right off the bat, but I remember Marilyn Manson using word "gloominati" for instance) or pretty meaningless made up words like "schizzle" (in case of Snoop Dogg) or usual derivatives like "fuckedy fuck". Moreover, in many transcripts for hip-hop people write down words as they are pronounced, which can be pretty much distorted for some artists (which of course ideally shouldn't count as a "new word", but that's complicated, yeah).
While Aeson Rock and DMX are clearly extreme and not surprising at all, it's not that clear for some guys in the middle.
So, first off, for every data project sources should be provided, or at least more specific definition, how text was processed, tokenized, analyzed. Second, several more "data slices" should be provided, for instance 100 most used words which are unique for that artist compared to other artist in the list.
- duney 13y agoThe example you used for clever wordplay, "gloominati," is actually considered a portmanteau word. It's the result of combining multiple words to create a new word. (I say this not to be a pedant, but because I learned the term recently and was amused that we actually have a word for it.)
- krick 13y agoYes, portmanteaus are exactly what I was meaning by "clever wordplay". English isn't my primary language so it's hard to remember the right word sometimes, sorry for that. :)
- danielsf 13y agoOP here. Do I really need to provide all of this to satisfy the reader's ability to grasp the basic premise of the site? this isn't a thesis or academic pursuit, just comparing some rappers for fun. I used plain NLTK token analysis on rap genius lyrics. in terms of several more data slices...I agree that there should be more cuts of the data, but you must understand the amount of time that it took me to put this together.
- krick 13y agoOf course it's entirely up to you what to provide. It would be silly of me to question that. I'm not paying you for that, so how can I demand anything? I'm just saying what I think should've been done. That's how I would do it, at least. You see, I have a strong opinion on that any data-analytic work is pretty close to being useless if it's not reproducible. And I mean really close. I already mentioned few questions that naturally arise reading your article which are crucial to understand your results and are not addressed by the article. So, ideally, any data analysis done for the open community should provide both full dataset and full sources. Unfortunately, it's not always possible: dataset may be several terabytes long, there might be legal issues about disclosure of the data (or letting everyone know how exactly author acquired them), sources might be under NDA, whatever. In this case description should be as pedantic as possible, because some little details can change the whole meaning of statistics entirely. By the way, NLTK allows you to do all kinds of processing, so it isn't the answer. So what would I do? The usual course, actually: would do the work in iPython Notebook, cleaning it up afterwards, would've drawn graphs in place and printed some few slices I've said already while processing, so it would be easier to understand what actually that unique words counted might be like. While fancy d3 graphs are cool for sure, but not nearly as useful.