The #THEJAYZMIXTAPE is a Digital Humanities project that was posted on the Illinois Open Publishing Network as a part of the Publishing Without Walls initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This project was created by Dr. Kenton Rambsy, who is a Black literature professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Throughout the project, Dr Kenton Rambsy shows how Jay Z’s music can be studied as both an art and as literature. This project uses Voyant tools, Scalar, Rap Genius and other tools in order to closely analyze data from all of the albums from Jay Z. After examining all of his albums and just him as whole, the author is able to clearly show his impact worldwide, and how he changed Hip-Hop and African American literature forever.
This project launched around 2017 but it continued to be developed and was completely finished in 2018. The timing of this presentation was at a perfect time because 2018 was around the time of a massive influx of digital humanities research that were focused on African American culture and Hip-Hop. This project examines every song he has produced throughout his Rap career. It goes very in depth when looking at his themes, linguistic patterns, his influences, and talking about his relationships he has made in his career.
From a digital humanities perspective, this project shows that that technology can be used to study language, art, and culture in very in depth ways. By putting data visualization, and text mining into play, it shows us that we can discover a great deal of information and how we can expand literary analysis and in this case, showing that Hip-Hop isn’t just a type of music, but it is a way of life and Jay Z has changed the trajectory of Hip-Hop culture and the evolution of the African American community.