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

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.

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.

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.

Most Viewed Articles on Wikipedia

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

   Data sourced from the Wikimedia Pageviews API (30-day total, updated 10/23/25).

Citation Counter

   In-Progress

The Elements^[1]

✶ Graffiti Writing

Graffiti Artists (42 members)

✶ DJing

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

✶ Street Dancing

✶ Beatboxing

✶ MCing

✶ Knowledge

More Elements

Click here for a full list of categories including:

Entrepreneurs (4 members)

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

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.^[2]

Contact

This site is administered by the CHHHP team.

[1] ttps://www.thetempleofhiphop.org/9-elements

[2] ttps://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Properties_and_types

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