Digital Flows: Analysing Digital-Native Hip-Hop Culture

ended

DIGITAL-FLOWS is a groundbreaking investigation of digital-native hip-hop culture, imparting new insights to European policy areas concerning Internet use, education, social equality, the creative economies, and connected communities. The overarching aim is to uncover and analyse the dynamic cultural politics of hip-hop music and community on the Internet, with three specific objectives: to design and apply a groundbreaking web-oriented, two-part methodology of data-driven and case-study research into online cultural networks; to apply musical, thematic, and political/feminist/critical race analysis to digital data objects (music, video, text) as expressions of hip-hop culture, politics, and aesthetics; and to generate conclusions on European priorities concerning online cultural expression, engagement, and education for sharing with policymakers. Among hip-hop's vast international listener base are many young and/or marginalised individuals, with unanswered questions about safety and security, communal opportunities, and wellbeing benefits of interaction with hip-hop's diverse and dynamic cultural expressions online. DIGITAL-FLOWS pioneers new approaches to these questions, generating high-impact outputs for academic and target audiences and policy recommendations concerning Internet use, education, and integration. The project will set a new benchmark in interdisciplinary studies of digital-native culture and provide a transferable model for web-oriented studies of popular culture more broadly. The research takes place in association with the CIPHER: Hip-Hop Interpellation initiative at University College Cork, an ERC funded team working in intersectoral collaboration with the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Utilising UCC's CIPHER research network, DIGITAL-FLOWS' investigation of Internet-based music culture will establish me as a field leader in digital/popular musicology and inaugurate a cutting-edge methodology for the study of online cultural expression.