RAP MAP

So I was listening to E-40 and discussing hyphy and regional styles of rap with a co-worker the other day, when I came up with a potentailly interesting idea: if you georeferenced the lyrics of all rap albums released over the past year and performed some kind of linguistic analysis, parsing on distinctive words, grammar, enunciation, etc., could you distinguish different regional styles without knowning them beforehand? I think it would make for some cool maps. You’d need access to some kind of lyrics database, and you’d need to associate each set of lyrics with the rapper’s city. Not sure how one would parse the data, but maybe regression trees? Neural net? Something a little more supervised? This conversation also brought to light how phenomenally distant I am from the world of hip-hop. I first heard about hyphy on public radio, and I only just learned to spell it on Wikipedia.