| Tahir Hemphill | |
| Birth Date: | 14 May 1972 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, US |
| Field: | Creative technology Multimedia art Photography Sculpture |
| Training: | Morehouse College Pratt Institute |
Tahir Hemphill (born May 14, 1972) is an American multimedia artist, ethnolinguist, and design researcher. He developed the Hip Hop Word Count database.[1]
Hemphill grew up in New York City, in the Lower East Side neighborhood. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School with a Regents diploma concentration in Electrical Engineering.[2] He is African-American.
Hemphill graduated from Morehouse College 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.
Hemphill created an ethnographic database of hip-hop lyrics covering the period from 1979 to the present.[3] [4] 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 per word, number of letters per word, polysyllabic words, as well as an education and audience reading level rating.[5] 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.