Digital Flows: Analysing Digital-Native Hip-Hop Culture

Project Information

DIGITAL-FLOWS

Grant agreement ID: 891888

DOI

10.3030/891888

Project closed

EC signature date 14 April 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 590,72

EU contribution

€ 184 590,72

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DIGITAL-FLOWS (Digital Flows: Analysing Digital-Native Hip-Hop Culture)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Digital Flows was a groundbreaking investigation of hip hop culture on the internet, producing a significant number of high-impact academic publications, enabling a globally inclusive conference advancing scholarship on music and the internet, and helping to develop research independence for the MSCA fellow.

In 2018, hip-hop as a genre boasted a third of all songs played across on-demand music streaming platforms, which demonstrates its vast international listener base. Hip-hop fans represent a major force in the digital creative economies, and the art form has popular appeal worldwide due to its international spread via the internet. More urgently, many hip-hop listeners are young, and often marginalised, leaving unanswered questions about safety and security, communal opportunities, and wellbeing benefits of interaction with hip-hop’s diverse and dynamic cultural expressions on the web. Digital Flows pioneered new approaches to such questions, and generated high-impact research outputs on hip hop’s online manifestations.

The project emphasised the societal value of digital creative activities while also applying a critical eye to the digital media platforms on which many online hip hop practices play out. Three quarters of Europeans go online daily for leisure activites, social communication, and media consumption, yet do so predominantly on the terms of tech conglomerates. Focusing on how hip hop culture navigates strategies of control, surveillance, and monetisation online provided an important case study that can be transferred and expanded to other domains of internet activity.

Digital Flows advanced the study of hip hop and the internet methodologically by combining data-oriented analysis with context-sensitive close readings. It helped understand how hip hop – a cultural form developed on the street – intersects with transformative technologies of global reach. It applied cutting edge theories from a range of relevant bodies of work, such as intersectional feminism and Black studies, to ‘update’ scholarship on hip hop for the internet era. Finally, it contributed to broader European priorities concerning online cultural expression, engagement, and security through a focus on the ethics of data use.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

A thorough and output-oriented work programme enabled the development of several research publications, events, and career impacts. These include a monograph, two peer-reviewed journal articles, two chapters in edited collections, a conference, a collaboration with an industry body, several conference presentations, several blog posts, and a newsletter article.

The open access monograph, Digital Flows: Internet-based Hip Hop Music and Culture, is under contract with Oxford University Press, and will examine the intersections between the internet and hip hop music and culture. It will have broad appeal to readerships in fields including music, media, and technology. The article ‘Saturation Season: Inclusivity, Queerness, and Aesthetics in the New Media Practices of Brockhampton’, co-authored with Kai Arne Hansen of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, was published in Popular Music and Society 45(1). Part of a special issue on music, digitalisation, and democracy, the article provides in-depth cultural perspectives on (online) new media practices, audiovisual aesthetics, and queering practices in hip hop. The project also produced an article on hip hop producers and livestreaming, ‘Hip-hop producer-hosts, beat battles, and online music production communities on Twitch’, co-authored with Jason Ng of University College Cork, in First Monday 27(6). The article examined developments in the creative industries specific to hip hop culture which has led to musicians adopting livestreaming technologies to host participatory events.

The project’s focus on hip hop music recordings as texts led to a case-study chapter in the edited collection Analyzing Recorded Music. Insights on big data text analysis inform another chapter, in the Oxford Handbook on the Digital Sociology of Music, which will be an important resource for researchers and students interested in studying online music discourse. Additional publications are currently under review.

The conference Internet Musicking: Popular Music and Online Cultures featured 40 speakers in over 10 timezones and took place over two days in May 2022. It featured an innovative and inclusive code of behaviour which has since influenced established conferences such as the Society for Musicology in Ireland (June 2022). The programme included scholars demonstrating a diversity of career levels, genders, and racial and ethnic origins, with various disciplinary specialities including musicology, popular music studies, media studies, communication, internet studies, cultural studies, and sociology. It also inspired the organisation of a follow-up conference in the US (planning currently in progress).

Conference presentations featured prominently as part of the dissemination, exploitation, and communication of research, with ten presentations given on various aspects of the project in Ireland, across the UK and Europe, and internationally. The digitalflo.ws website was a constant source of public-facing project information as well as a publication platform for research-in-progress and blog posts (in the spirit of open science), featuring pilot studies as well as data visualisations.

These outputs are supplemented by training and career development for the MSCA fellow.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The research methodology radically advanced current approaches to internet data in music studies. Digital Flows featured a combination of ‘big data’ analyses, cultural studies, and ethnography (principally interviews). It therefore enabled research that took both large-scale and small-scale findings into consideration, as well as providing a context-sensitive insider view of online hip hop culture through active engagement with digital communities. The publication of the methodological innovations (in a forthcoming chapter) will provide a particularly important resource for scholars and students.

Furthermore, the monograph will present the first detailed study of hip hop in the internet era, contributing insights to hip hop studies on digital interventions into the culture and expanding the purview of digital humanities.

The project has generated findings that could inform policymakers in areas of European strategic priority including internet use, education, social equality, the creative economies, and connected communities. It will be able to advise on governmental action concerning Net Neutrality which risks disrupting the relationships between popular and digital culture.

'Digital Flows' project logo