Tom R. Leppard, PhD
I am a father, a Londoner, a former rugby player, and a postdoctoral scholar for the Data Science and AI Academy at North Carolina State University.
Visualising Grime
About | Research | Teaching | Network Tutorials | CV | Visualising Grime
For my dissertation, I studied the collaboraitons between Grime musicians. Grime is a UK-based rap genre that emerged from the east London reggae and Garage scene in the early 2000s. Broadly speaking, my dissertation investigated how network embeddedness is assciated with the career success of 122 Grime artists. I codded their collaborations with others in the sample on Spotify over a 22 year period (2001-2022). From this, I generated directed networks for each year. An outward connection represents artist A appearing on artist B’s Spotify profile (working on B’s songs). An inward connection represents B featuring on A’s profile (featuring on their songs). Here is a small collection of various visualisations I have created to showcase some of my work on this genre of music. Some of the visualisations are interactive and will need to be opened as links.
Grime Networks Overtime
These line graphs illustrate the growth of Grime networks in terms of order (number of nodes) and size (number of edges). While there is a consistent increase in order, the size fluctuates more erratically. These indicate a steady expansion of the genre itself but a more erratic pattern in the collaborative connections between artists.
Communities of Collaborators
I ran some community detection on collaborations and related artists. To get the related artists, I used Spotifyr’s “get_related_artists” function to obtain the artists that the listeners of these 122 artists also listen to. I then visualised this as network to artsts are connected to related artists.
Grime in 3D
These are some 3D interactive networks from a few years of the genre. You will need to click the link. Then, feel free to click on, move, and scroll in or out of the visualisation.
Reciprocity in Grime - 2009
Reciprocity in Grime - 2014
Reciprocity in Grime - 2015
The colours of the nodes in these networks represent a unique measure of reciprocity I developed in my dissertation. Blue spheres represent “givers” — artists whose collaborations mostly appear on other artists’ profiles, meaning they have more outward connections than inward. Green spheres represent “takers” — artists who receive more collaborations than they give, meaning they have more inward connections than outward. Purple spheres represent “reciprocators” — artists who give and receive collaborations in equal measure, maintaining a balanced exchange. Red spheres represent artists who have never collaborated with anyone in the network.
Grime Collaborations Overtime
This is an ndtv network movie depicting the collaborations of Grime artists over the 22 year period I observed. For this visual, I removed isolated artists from each year.You will need to click the link. Then press the play button on the bottom right. You can alter the speed at which the network chances by using te settings on the top right.