2016 Candidates
in Hip-Hop

Design and Development
Project Overview
As an international student from Taiwan, the U.S. 2016 presidential candidates I’m most curious about are definitely Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. That led me to inspect the numbers of their mentions in hip-hop songs and, in a sense, recreate some of the graphics FiveThirtyEight published with this data back in 2016.
My Contributions
I used the pivot table function in Google Sheets to organize the data. The chart is made in D3.js and is a combination of a stacked bar chart and a scatterplot. Each dot represents a song with different colors signalizing the sentiments.
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Link to the project
Hip-hop is often brutally honest about controversial issues in society – money, guns, drugs, sex and, of course, politics.
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FiveThirtyEight, in part with the help of Genius, collected and cleaned a dataset, containing the number of 2016 candidates’ names mentioned in hip-hop songs between 1989 to 2016.
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Before 2016, Donald Trump was the most mentioned candidate in hip-hop songs with most of them portraying him in a positive light regarding his fortune and fame. The big turning point, however, came in the election that sent him to the White House. The number of Trump mentioned in the hip-hop songs with negative sentiment rose evidently.

I wanted to showcase this sentiment transition in an interactive data visualization created with D3.js. In this project, users can clearly see the number of hip-hop songs mentioning about Trump as well as Clinton and interactive with every dot to know more about the singer, the song, and the lyrics.
Personal Project
Design and Development
Sep 2019
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