There’s a two-part blog post now up at our associated project Digital Flows, looking at online hip-hop. In these posts Steve uses a comment scraping method to analyse how lo-fi commentary has changed – and how it hasn’t – during the quarantine/lockdown measures imposed by COVID-19 (March to December 2020).
Illustration by Juan Pablo Machado
The first post explains how the research was undertaken and examines changes that directly address the pandemic. It goes on to discuss a trend of studying and working: lo-fi’s large student audience often comment about their studying habits during this period (a relatively common thing to post about even before COVID-19!).
The second post reflects on lofi hip-hop as a genre then details additional results: themes of identity, ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ, cultural references, conversational aspects, and emotional expression.
Steve would be glad to hear feedback on this work-in-progress. Stay tuned into the Digital Flows project!