I liked this article a lot but I am a bit unsure about the way your empirical analysis worked. 1) what are the results if you consider each diss track a separate data point rather than totaling them across years? 2) what exactly is the difference between a 2 and 3 point diss? Looking forward to more!
This is a valid critique! I'm not entirely sure what you mean in the first point--I only wanted to measure if disses had, in fact, become more personal over time, which is why I ordered them chronologically. The line between a 2 and 3-point diss is definitely blurry. In my head, a 2-point diss would be one where "we" remember the listening experience primarily for the song and its associated ruthlessness ("Not Like Us" would fall under this category). A 3-point diss is one where the listening experience and memory are almost exclusively tied to the specific allegations being made ("Meet the Grahams" falls under this category). Another way I considered the difference is thinking about it If a rapper could have elicited a similar level of humiliation by revealing the allegation in a press release (For example, Pusha T telling the world about Drakes's son).
Thanks for the response and explanation! As to point 1: In your graph you have data points with the value of 5, even though this is not a possible rating for songs. I assume you just added up the points for years with more than one diss (eg 1996?) but you want to measure how personal a beef is, not how common beefs are, so you shouldn’t make years with more diss tracks have more points. What happens if you instead make every song 1 data point rather than every year one data point?
Real. I think plotting the data points individually along the X axis at their specific dates would lend the most insight. The tradeoff is that then they won't be evenly spaced, though I don't think that's an issue.
I liked this article a lot but I am a bit unsure about the way your empirical analysis worked. 1) what are the results if you consider each diss track a separate data point rather than totaling them across years? 2) what exactly is the difference between a 2 and 3 point diss? Looking forward to more!
This is a valid critique! I'm not entirely sure what you mean in the first point--I only wanted to measure if disses had, in fact, become more personal over time, which is why I ordered them chronologically. The line between a 2 and 3-point diss is definitely blurry. In my head, a 2-point diss would be one where "we" remember the listening experience primarily for the song and its associated ruthlessness ("Not Like Us" would fall under this category). A 3-point diss is one where the listening experience and memory are almost exclusively tied to the specific allegations being made ("Meet the Grahams" falls under this category). Another way I considered the difference is thinking about it If a rapper could have elicited a similar level of humiliation by revealing the allegation in a press release (For example, Pusha T telling the world about Drakes's son).
Thanks for the response and explanation! As to point 1: In your graph you have data points with the value of 5, even though this is not a possible rating for songs. I assume you just added up the points for years with more than one diss (eg 1996?) but you want to measure how personal a beef is, not how common beefs are, so you shouldn’t make years with more diss tracks have more points. What happens if you instead make every song 1 data point rather than every year one data point?
Real. I think plotting the data points individually along the X axis at their specific dates would lend the most insight. The tradeoff is that then they won't be evenly spaced, though I don't think that's an issue.