Mapping global hip hop

27 Feb 2025

UCC celebrates the successful conclusion of the world’s first global hip-hop knowledge-mapping project, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, funded by a €2 million European Research Council consolidator grant and led by Prof. Griffith Rolleffson.

Outputs include numerous peer-reviewed articles and arts practice outputs, the journal Global Hip Hop Studies and a major conference. The research team included specialists from Ireland, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand, Australia, the US, UK and Mozambique.

Why has this highly localised and authenticising African American music translated so widely to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe? asks Professor Rolleffson’s CIPHER project

CIPHER addresses the central question: why has this highly localised and authenticising African American music translated so widely to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe? And how globalisation and localisation are related.

CIPHER’s semantic web methodology tracks how hip-hop memes—slogans, anthems, and icons - are simultaneously produced by creative people and in turn produce creative people. This research clears the conceptual impasse of structural ‘cultural imperialism’ versus agentic ‘cultural appropriation’ debates and instrumentalizes the methodological distance between ethnographic specificity and big data generality. It does so by creating a feedback loop between digital humanities methods (crowd sourcing, semantic tagging, computational stylometry) and ethnographic fieldwork techniques (interviews, musical analysis, participant observation). The result is transformational of our understanding of culture and of cultural production itself, whilst shedding light on pressing questions around globalization.