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✶✶ Welcome to the Chicago Hip-Hop History Project ✶✶

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About the Project

Launched in 2024 with support from The 2024 UIC Awards for Creative Activity and in collaboration with the Chicago Hip-Hop Heritage Museum, the Chicago Hip-Hop History Project aims to provide context and connections for all elements of Chicago hip-hop history using the MediaWiki platform.

Canonical List

Our research began by developing a foundational, continuously evolving canonical list of figures, organizations, and cultural entities that shaped the history of Chicago hip-hop, drawing on foundational lists compiled in the 1980s and 1990s.

'The List' is a verified and structured dataset built from archival research, community consultation, and student-led research/documentation. 'The List' currently has 1700 total unique pages including 367 unknown artists that we are currently working to identify. Please see our editors and inclusion criteria pages for more information about our research team and data collection methods.

Comparing 'The List' with Wikipedia

   180 of the pages in the CHHHP also have a corresponding article on Wikipedia, while 417 do not have a corresponding article.

Survey of Wikipedia

Alongside this growing knowledge base, we are developing computational methods to examine the scope and structure of hip-hop scholarship already published on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is widely considered the largest general reference source in human history.It receives around 1 billion unique visits per month, ranking consistently among the top 10 most-visited websites in the world.

There is currently no established system for analyzing the representation of Chicago’s hip-hop scholarship on Wikipedia. To address this, we are using Semantic MediaWiki, the same open-source platform that underlies Wikipedia, so that our data are structured, shareable, and machine-readable for integration with broader digital humanities research.

By comparing patterns between our curated data and Wikipedia’s existing content, we identify coverage gaps, evaluate the quality and reliability of cited sources, and map where Chicago’s contributions remain underrepresented. These findings directly inform a prioritized plan for Wikipedia editing, guiding students and collaborators as they work to expand, correct, and strengthen hip-hop scholarship across open-knowledge platforms.

Disambiguation and Entity Reconciliation

Many artists and organizations appear under slightly different names or share names with unrelated subjects. Our student researchers verify and resolve ambiguous or duplicate names by working closely with the staff at the Chicago Hip-Hop Heritage Museum and other community partners.

We also perform entity reconciliation, a process that aligns our canonical list of Chicago hip-hop figures, organizations, and cultural entities with corresponding entries on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Bibliometric Survey

At the core of the project is a bibliographic survey of Wikipedia, designed to quantify how Chicago’s hip-hop history has been represented—and where it remains invisible.

Most Viewed Articles on Wikipedia

Article	Category	Date of birth	Pageviews in past 30 days	Citations on Wikipedia
Kanye West	Producers EmCees	8 June 1977	309,055	605
King Von	EmCees	9 August 1994	205,075	191
Juice WRLD	EmCees	2 December 1998	114,820	240
Lil Durk	EmCees	19 October 1992	90,484	186
Jennifer Hudson	EmCees	12 September 1981	89,003	162
2hollis	EmCees		45,056
Young Dolph	EmCees	27 July 1985	37,742	201
Earl Sweatshirt	EmCees	24 February 1994	29,518	93
G Herbo	EmCees	8 October 1995	26,100	70
Gil Scott-Heron	EmCees Writers	1 April 1949	25,863	137
Lupe Fiasco	Producers EmCees	7 June 1989	22,949	183
Da Brat	EmCees		22,496	30
Donny Hathaway	Knowledge		21,659	65
Vic Mensa	EmCees	6 June 1993	20,045	84
Serengeti	EmCees		16,543	36
Fredo Santana	EmCees	4 July 1990	14,037	41
Polo G	EmCees	6 January 1999	11,854	90
Harold Washington	Knowledge	15 April 1922	11,308	124
Hitmaka	Producers EmCees	9 September 1985	10,226	55
Lil Reese	EmCees	6 January 1993	9,861	31
... further results

   Data sourced from the Wikimedia Pageviews API (30-day total, updated 11/10/25).

Genius

We fetch and analyze the following data via the Genius API

Total Genius songs

• Total number of songs attributed to this artist on Genius.com (including primary tracks and, optionally, features, depending on how the script is configured).

Total Genius lyric pageviews

• Sum of Genius lyric pageviews (stats.pageviews) across all songs for this artist.

Total Genius annotations

• Total number of annotations across all Genius song pages for this artist (sum of annotation_count per song).

Total Genius contributors

• Total number of unique Genius user accounts that have contributed to this artist’s song pages (approximated from Genius stats; may be a lower bound).

The Elements

✶ Graffiti Writing

• Graffiti Artists (42 members)

✶ DJing

• Disc Jockeys (DJs) / Turntablists (96 members)
• Radio Personalities
• Producers (104 members)

✶ Street Dancing

• Street Dancers (19 members)
  • Lockers
  • Poppers
  • Breakers
• Street Dance Groups

✶ Beatboxing

✶ MCing

• EmCees (MCs) (682 members)
• Hip-Hop Groups (111 members)

✶ Knowledge

• Philosophies
• Writers

More Elements

Click here for a full list of categories including:

• Entrepreneurs (4 members)

• Fashion Designers (1 members)
• Recording Studios
• Record Labels
• and many others...

Genres

The following hip-hop genres are associated with Chicago and have an article on Wikipedia:

  * Chicago hip-hop
  * Drill music
  * Midwestern hip-hop
  * Chopper (rap)
  * Comedy hip-hop
  * Freestyle rap
  * Hipster hop
  * Mumble rap
  * Political hip-hop
  * Progressive rap

EchoNest (Spotify) includes Chicago artists in each of the following genre maps:

  * Hip-Hop
  * Rap
  * Gangster Rap
  * Melodic Rap
  * Golden Age Hip-hop
  * Hip-house  
  * Chicago Bop
  * Chicago Rap
  * Chicago Drill

Recently Updated Pages

• Radio Stations (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 19:15:22)
• Doc Illa (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 18:03:30)
• Shawn Boyd (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 18:00:49)
• Black High-Priestess (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:59:04)
• DJ 331/3 (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:56:08)
• Save One (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:54:10)
• Super Business Women Show (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:52:22)
• Cheryl Burton (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:51:05)
• 704 (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:49:39)
• David McKinley Trotter (Modification date"Modification date" is a predefined property that corresponds to the date of the last modification of a subject and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.: 15 April 2026 17:46:47)

... further results

For Researchers

This digital encyclopedia is a Semantic MediaWiki project. Semantic properties are used to add structured, machine-readable data to pages within this project. This allows for enhanced search capabilities, data extraction, and the creation of specialized views based on semantic information.

Contact

This site is administered by the CHHHP team.