By analyzing the history of lyrics and scripted entertainment in human history, we can predict the prevalent trends of the times, thereby painting a realer, more personal history of culture.
In every era of human history, however you slice it, there are always certain ideas (jokes, references, "moments") that have permeated society at large and have carved out their place in our collective memories.
On some occasions, the pop culture of any given era incorporates some of these ideas into their own existence, thereby leaving a record for the future. Whether it is embedded in the script of a TV show or in the chorus lyrics of an iconic song, the collection of data that is available on the internet is huge. I want to examine the data and observe some trends and meta trends that may be visible to "us" viewing from the future and effectively put together a timeline of human culture.
Some examples of these ideas and trends
- OJ Simpson - Likely associated with 1. his football career (c. 1995) and 2. his football career (c. 1970-79)
Gather the top 100 songs of every year and find trends that match the true popular trends of the time.
Lyrics
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Scrape the yearly Billboard Hot-100 song lists with Beautiful Soup.
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Collect the lyric and song metadata of each song from Genius with LyricsGenius (genius API wrapper).
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True trend data set from Google Trends and other historical references.
- Use spacy to evaluate and parse lyrics.
- Observe most popular nouns, adverbs, entities, verbs.
- Extract analysis from these trends
- Collect a TV and movie scripts dataset to observe along side song lyric dataset
- Observe resounding themes/tones in the lyrics. (For example: Did the Apollo lunar missions correlate with more uplifting tones?)