For my final project of GEOG 572, I chose to map the places that Nicki Minaj has referenced throughout her entire discography. I started by scraping names of locations from a dataset of Nicki's lyrics on Huggingface.co, using Python code. I then realized that this dataset did not contain lyrics for all of Nicki's music (particularly, her earlier mixtapes and her newest albums). This was a major hurdle, as I then had to manually comb through the lyrics of missing songs through Genius.com and AZLyrics.com.
Once I obtained all location names to the best of my knowledge, I processed the data in Excel, adding fields for the earliest era of the location's mention (a specific time period in Nicki's career) and the amount of times I found that location in her works. After georeferencing the locations and plotting them in ArcGIS Pro, I exported the data into Adobe Illustrator where I created a unique style for each era and organized all the labels manually. This proved to be another challenge: while I had hoped to create a "word cloud" of names in an avant-garde pop art style, I realized that adjusting text size as a variable would inevitably push some labels far away from their true location. I decided to make this compromise, though, because for the purpose of this project, the basemap merely serves as a backdrop for viewers to associate words with a general area on the map.
The resulting layout looks super cool, and reflects my work to push my own creative boundaries. Throughout this project, I learned to accept challenges and failures while innovating ways to create my imagined product. I further developed my design skills in Illustrator, workflows with Excel and ArcGIS Pro, and learned to adapt to both the advantages and limitations of A.I. tools.
(Disclaimer: I used Microsoft Copilot to assist with Internet data research, georeferencing, and to search through my data for location names. All other work for this project is my own.)