Its deeper than rap, towards culturally responsive CS
For many people, when they think of hiphop, they don’t think Artificial Intelligence. I, on the other hand do. I have this crazy theory that hiphop can be used to introduce diverse populations to the beauty and joy of computing, through the delightful area of natural language processing.
This belief started taking root in my mind when I was doing my masters at the University of Memphis. My work was focused on the semantic web, and our group built ontologies. This coincided with the same time that I was super heavy into JayZ. Everyday I would drive to lab listening to Jay, and spending inordinate amounts of time trying to divine the meaning of his lyrics and their implications. There was this particular line in 03 Bonnie and Clyde, that always had me bothered. It went “The problem is, you dudes treat the one that you lovin, with the same respect that you treat the one that you humpin.” The implication of that lyric was that the person who was the object of the man’s affection, was not the same person with whom the man was having sexual relations. I would often wonder, how that line could be parsed and then ran through an intelligent system that could clearly explicate the implications of that statement.
Over the years, my love of JayZ did not diminished, and I was able to see the evolution of thought in his lyrics. The same man, whose lyric was talking about being in love with one person and sleeping with another, was now also talking about the miscarriage of his wife and the birth of his daughter. At this point, you are probably wondering what has all this got to do with AI or Computer Science? Because I was deeply embedded in semantic web research, I started to see hiphop lyrics as an object to do computation with. I started to imagine the kinds of things that could be done when CS is brought to bear on a field like hiphop. Since my work was in natural language understanding, it was the first place I imagined a hiphop centric CS curriculum.
One of the many appeals of hiphop lyrics is their metaphorical complexity. From the cognitive linguistics view of metaphors, i.e. Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, hiphop is laden with novel metaphors. Metaphors that just stop you dead in your cognitive tracks from their semantic complexity. The same can be said of other kinds of lyrics as well, but what makes hiphop so interesting is its visceral nature and its appeal with underrepresented populations. When Computer Science is used as a tool to unearth the lyrical complexity of a genre like hiphop, it allows a historically under-represented group in CS like African Americans, to see that their culture has some computational heft, and creates a more engaging reason to delve deep into Computer Science, not because someone else says so, but because there is an intrinsic motivation to see what is birthed when CS meets hiphop. Such a merger can help us address the ever present issue of how to successfully engage ethnic minorities in Computer Science, who have such woeful representation as of this writing.
Another interesting thing that I don’t know I want to share at this moment is my magnum opus, my major treatise, the guiding principle of doing culturally responsive CS. That the only the computational thinking that is evident in the creation and decoding of rap lyrics, hails from a cultural tradition that goes all the way back to Africa, West Africa, and in particular the Yoruba people, through their religion and divination system. Sychomancy, using binary arithmetic to commune with the divine. Now that my friends is a hell of a whopper. That shit right there!! They didn’t call it binary, but that is what the divination system is built on. So there must be some embedded knowledge of computation that is inherent to those cultures. This embedded computational thingamajig, is what is we see emerge in the artforms of signifying, jazz and then for this generation, rap.
If you are captured and taken to another world, what are they only things that you can take with you that no one can beat or destroy away? It is your way of reasoning. Slavery created the perfect environment for a certain kind of reasoning to take root and germinate. That way of reasoning has be distilled, and aged through the generations into its finest form that we now have the delightful pleasure of enjoying in the beautiful artform that is hiphop. Just like the chateau d’Yquem is considered the finest sauternes, the nectar of the gods, so is rap to cognitive linguistic view of metaphor. You see the highest form of metaphoric complexity in rap lyrics. Layers and layers of complexity, pulling ever so carefully from this domain, and that domain, and combining them together to create intellectual titillation, till its builds into an orgasmic crescendo in freestyle rap.
Computational thinking presents a tantalizing opportunity for culturally responsive pedagogy. Because of its recent ascendancy, there is very little research both empirical and theoretical on how culturally responsive pedagogy that supports computational thinking can be done. It is of interest to note that similar work has been done in Computer Science with the emergence of the ethno-computing field. Emerging scholars are starting to engage scholarship in the process of how we draw upon communities cultural resources, within CS. My work is joining in this tradition. A tradition of scholars who are explicitly drawing upon the communities of color’s strength as the foundation from which knowledge is developed.
A lot of the ideas of my academic research is motivated by the ideas of Seymour Papert, which are wonderfully elaborated in his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. What Papert did in the 80s with the creation of the LOGO programming environment was to demonstrate how children’s computational thinking skills can be harnessed through the use of a computational object to think with, in his case the “LOGO turtle”.
The aspects of Papert’s work that is mostly influential in this research is the idea that knowledge is built upon already existing ideas and schema that students have. Additionally, Papert hit on an idea that I believe is essential to the creation of culturally relevant pedagogy. The idea that education should have cultural resonance. In Mindstorms, Papert lays out how his love of gears was a great entry point and an intuitive cultural tool that he could use to understand formal systems.
In the Foreword of this book I described how gears helped mathematical ideas to enter my life. Several qualities contributed to their effectiveness. First they were a part of my natural “landscape,”embedded in the culture around me. . . . Second, gears were part of the world of adults around me and through them I could relate to these people. Third, I could use my body to think about the gears. . . . And finally, because, in a very real sense, the relationship between gears contains a great deal of mathematical information, I could use gears to think about formal systems.(?, pp. 11)
These ideas that Papert lays down in this excerpt from his book could be understood as the foundational articles upon which every culturally relevant pedagogical work should be built. It is for this reason why my work appropriates hip-hop lyrics as a computational object to think with, just like LOGO’s cybernetic Turtle. One can extract knowledge from hip-hop lyrics through computational means. As a result, hip-hop lyrics in this context becomes a computational object to think with. You can manipulate it, you can dissect it, and you can mentally engage with it.
Appropriating the turtle in the LOGO programming environment, gave children a way to think about the principle of computation and the practice of programming. Similarly, I appropriate lyrical analysis as a way to think about principles of computation. Just like gears helped mathematical ideas enter Papert’s life, I believe lyrical analysis with an application in hip-hop can be used to introduce principles of computation while pulling on students of color cultural resources.
It is my belief that African Americans students, in particular, have a cultural heritage that favors the development of metaphoric reasoning based on deep rhetorical tradition like signifying from which rap emerges. I believe with sufficient training, these students could probably solve some of the grand challenges of computing like semantics in natural language understanding. One of the working hypothesis for explaining the low-achievement of underrepresented students in computer science classes, is that these youth of color are suffering from stereotype threat. My hope is that by using hip-hop as the object on which computation is understood, this helps ameliorate some aspects of the threat. Just like Papert used the metaphor of the turtle to expose children to programming in a non-threatening way, I believe that creating curriculum that builds upon what students are already familiar with can help introduce Computer Science in a non-threatening and affirming way.
Teaching materials in a way that culturally connects to the audience
Unearthing the intellectual complexity in hiphop lyrics
Getting students to fall in love with CS and AI
Sucker emcees they call me sire
Talk about entrepreneurship as the pervasive theme in hiphop, connect that to entrepreneurship in the tech industry. Connect that to the kind of psychology that you need to be successful in tech. the kinda of psychology you need to build companies, to be a crazy dreamer. Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits, the square pegs in a round hole, the ones that are crazy enough to think they are can change the worlds, are the ones that usually do.
And of course talk about rapgenius. Talk about annotation, and how rapgenius is building this crowd sourced annotation platform that can actually aid computational intelligence. Leveraging the wealth of the hiphop culture to understand human reasoning.
Rap is the first cultural universal. Yeah I said it. One of the pure American artform. Just like Jazz, hiphop came of the African American tradition of signifying and playing the dozens.