Playing with Pop Culture: Writing an Algorithm To Analyze and Visualize Lyrics From the Musical “Hamilton”

In this paper, we discuss the interactive visualization project “How Does ‘Hamilton,’ the Non Stop, Hip-hop Broadway Sensation Tap Rap’s Master Rhymes to Blur Musical Lines?” and the rhyme-pattern analysis algorithm that made the piece possible. This interactive extracts and describes the rhyme patterns interlaced throughout Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit “Hamilton,” analyzing their higher-order structure to produce a genealogy of rap influence in the popular musical. The final section of the interactive allows readers to input their own lyrics and view the algorithmic categorization of their submission’s rhymes. The project was created for the Wall Street Journal and published online at http://graphics.wsj.com/hamilton/. An adapted portion of the project also appeared in the print edition. This paper explains the motivations behind the project, and the research and development of the user-interaction models, a unique visual language for rhyme patterns and the algorithm that produces them. We then use this process to suggest methods for getting news readers to play with pop-cultural analysis as a tactic to create strong feedback loops of engagement with news interactives that are not specifically games.