Tahir Hemphill (born May 14, 1972) is an American multimedia artist, ethnolinguist, and design researcher. He developed the Hip Hop Word Count database.

Early life

Hemphill grew up in New York City, in the

Lower East Side The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets. Traditionally an im ...

neighborhood. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School with a Regents diploma concentration in Electrical Engineering. He is African-American. Hemphill graduated from

Morehouse College , mottoeng = And there was light (literal translation of Latin itself translated from Hebrew: "And light was made") , type = Private historically black men's liberal arts college , academic_affiliations ...

with a B.A. in Spanish. He has a certificate in Strategic Planning from Miami Ad School. He has a master's degree in Communications Design which he received from

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

Career

Hip-Hop Word Count database

Hemphill created an ethnographic database of hip-hop lyrics covering the period from 1979 to the present. In the database, assets are geotagged and dated according to album release dates. Hemphill calls this data a geography of language in the universe of hip-hop. Hemphill faceted the information with analysis of word count, number of

syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

per word, number of letters per word, polysyllabic words, as well as an education and audience reading level rating. Hemphill used Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook ("SMOG") and Flesch–Kincaid readability tests (created by plain English advocate Rudolf Flesch) to evaluate reading levels. Within his analysis of Hip-Hop through a scientific lens, he aims to trace origins of certain slang words, how they move to different communities, and their malleable, fluid meanings in different contexts.

Fellowships, grants, etc.

* 2010-2011: Artist-in-Residence, Eyebeam * 2012: Grantee, Creative Capital * 2012-2013: Fellow,

WEB Du Bois Institute The W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, formerly the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, is part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research located at Harvard University. Its main work i ...

at Harvard University * 2013: Fellow, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

* 2015: AIM Program participant, Bronx Museum of the Arts

Exhibitions

* 1999: "Black New York Photographers of the Twentieth Century."

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) b ...

* 2002: "Queens International Biennial." Queens Museum of Art * 2002:

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

* 2011: " Talk to Me." Museum of Modern Art. July 24, 2011 - November 7, 2011 * 2012:
The Box That Rocks: 30 Years of Video Music Box and the Rise of Hip Hop Music & Culture.
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. March 10 - May 28, 2012

Works and publications

* Hemphill, Tahir.
Visual Alchemy: Subversive Graphic Design in the Urban Environment.
' Master's Thesis. New York, NY: Pratt Institute: December 1999.

References

External links

Tahir Hemphill

Staple Crops
* American multimedia artists 21st-century African-American artists 1972 births Living people 21st-century African-American people 20th-century African-American people {{US-artist-stub