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.

DEFINE: Clarifies Rap Stats and Google Ngram Viewer as corpus-querying tools and distinguishes their use in humanistic versus scientific inquiry. XREF: Distal reading and corpus methods in digital humanities connect to Franco Moretti's distant reading and similar computational textual analysis approaches.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 336