 Hello. There's a number of reasons why I'm uncomfortable being called rap genius that I am rap genius doing my thing. One of which is that I just started working full time for the company a month ago. I'm not one of the founders. I was hired to be the sort of, well my official title is Education Czar. And so I'm new at this. I'm new to this kind of community. In fact, I had no idea about this conference until about a week ago. I was at MIT and Jamie told me about it. And when I told my bosses, they're like, oh yeah, we should have responded to those emails from Dan and you should go out. So I also did not know I was going to be presenting today so I didn't even have my six hours on the plane to rethink anything previous. But in any case, actually I am going to start off with a little bit of my own story just because, not because I had any hubris, but because it is demonstrative in certain ways of the ideas that came up to my mind in the morning in terms of engaging different communities because I was hired out of the rap genius community. I was working on the final chapter of a dissertation in English at UT Austin and I'm a hip hop fan and the final chapter was on the concept of the hip hop novel. So I was spending quite a bit of time on rap genius, productively procrastinating by annotating all my favorite hip hop artists and albums. And I had worked in the digital writing and research lab at UT Austin. So I had a mind, you know, an imagination for digital pedagogical tools and so at some point I was playing on rap genius and I realized that this would be an incredibly dynamic tool to bring into my classroom and I had no offense to anyone in this room had heard about annotation technologies, had been exposed to some of them but had not found anything compelling or in many cases never knew that any of the things that you guys talked about this morning even existed because they weren't there for the taking in the way that rapgenius.com was there for me to go ahead and add whatever I wanted to their database and so I added the great Gatsby and I added poems by William Carlos Williams and I added essentially my entire American literature curriculum with a few exceptions that were under copyright that I was nervous about and had my students in the classroom annotating these texts using rap genius. Now of course they thought it was pretty cool because it was you know rap genius in the classroom but the technology was there a really powerful tool for them to play around with and to really embody what was mentioned earlier this morning in terms of web 2.0 empowerment making them producers rather than consumers no longer reading the footnotes of a Norton anthology but in a sense creating our own Norton anthology with our own head notes and our own editorial decision making so at some point you know I was in touch with the guys from rap genius they were really excited about what I was doing and again this was not anything particularly innovative as everybody in this room knows you know scholars are interested in annotation teachers are interested in annotation so I don't consider my move at all brilliant in any way but the one sort of ridiculous thing that happened is that I ended up not going on to be a professor and yes becoming a rap genius so a little bit about the history of rap genius and many you know there's some visibility in the news but started off annotating hip-hop lyrics anybody know what the reference here in the Kanye West song is to yes there in the back that's right it's a remix of a Malcolm X speech by any genes necessary by Kanye West and you can see that dynamically demonstrated on the on the site here by clicking on an annotation and getting a little explanation that comes up there and so there's a this is where the biggest hip-hop site on the planet and have a huge archive of hip-hop lyrics much better than the Yale anthology of hip-hop lyrics which came out about it a year or two ago under much criticism because there were many transcription errors really know scholarly apparatus involved but our site of course if you see a mistake here you can immediately if you're a user correct the transcription error and of course there's this huge communal scholarly apparatus that surrounds every single text so for hip-hop scholars it's a really great tool but for hip-hop artists it's a great tool as well we're starting to verify artists to get them signed up for the site with a unique account which gives their explanations and annotations a different kind of visibility on the site and it's becoming more and more so with the exception of Jay-Z and Kanye West almost all the big-name rappers are coming to the site and creating creating these accounts as a part of their promotional tools along with Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and things like that Kendrick Lamar who you see up there probably released one of the most popular albums last year in hip-hop Nas no jumped ahead of Nas yeah Nas is a one of my favorite rappers he's verified on the site he's actually an early investor in rap genius you can see here how his annotations differ from the community's annotations with this particular highlight so he's got an account and his fans can follow him here very quickly this spread across the globe and so we have French rap on the site this French rapper actually cites rap genius in his rap sort of meta moment in the history of global hip-hop but of course we moved quickly beyond hip-hop and into rock and other musical lyrics so you can also search rap genius for rock lyrics for indie rock lyrics for classic rock lyrics like this eagle song and learn that Colita is a reference to sweet sweet marijuana if you were ever curious about that so we've also launched a literary initiative called poetry brain which has its own domain as a blog currently but eventually probably will be a separate vertical that houses our literary content and the blog is pretty great you should follow them on Twitter you should follow them on Facebook and keep up with the blog there's a lot interesting sort of cultural news items that are coming up here also highlights the the literary content that's going up on the site it's all going up on rap genius right now so for example we have T.S. Elliott the wasteland is up here was actually referenced in the New Yorker online the other day that you know rap genius scholars and editors and users had annotated the wasteland and somebody mentioned earlier Ulysses so Ulysses is being annotated currently on rap genius and I invite Catalina is that the name of the keynote to come and to annotate here to try to reproduce her handwritten notes online here with a community of public scholars Lewis Carroll is on the site Langston Hughes I mean the literary content is growing much much faster than the rap content right now because we can go back into history and add all those you know novels and poems that are in the public realm along with verifying rappers were also verifying novelists and poets so this is a book that came out in January by Adam Mansbach called the Rages Back and we got in touch with him and he put his first chapter of the brand new book on rap genius while he was on tour and you can see his green annotations here really neat sort of behind the scenes explanations of what he was doing in the chapter but fans have also come along and annotated as well you can listen to the audiobook on the right here and there's a little headnote that provides links to Amazon so you can buy the book same thing with poetry got verified poets going on in the site just this morning we launched a chapter from Tom Wolfs that's without an E Tom Wolfs novel sound on the site and FSG here is tweeting about the fact that a chapter from this guy's book is on rap genius that says something about the the publishing industry and their responses to technologies like this the Bible is on rap genius the King James version of the Bible is on rap genius and there's even a sort of table of contents and guide here that the community created to help people wade through the Bible American history the Mayflower compact all these dudes you want to know what they look like you can go to rap genius and see here's my little standage whoops what else do we have we have obviously lots of speeches from history somewhat ironically digital Millennium Copyright Act is on rap genius annotated by Stanford law professor Mark Lemley and that this is just one of many legal cases that are up there we see the eventual launch of something like called law genius one thing that's really hot right now rap genius is annotating the news breaking down the news line by line and so we started to publish blog entries about the news of the week statements on same-sex marriage from a couple weeks ago and speech that Hillary Clinton gave I don't know what this is some other legal stuff and gun violence acts and things like that Roger Ebert we were able to honor him and of course this week will probably have some of Margaret Thatcher speeches featured the Christopher Dorner manifesto was viral on rap genius for a while huge community of users on any site on any page you can see the people who explained the most here and you can see this is a pretty big number of folks that just logged on to the site to annotate to annotate this this this album this this lyric this you know manifesto Christopher Dorner that's a lot of folks right there Barack Obama's State of the Union all his speeches are on there I watched the State of the Union at the same time as I was reading it and annotating it on rap genius and I was not the only one there this is just a quick snapshot of my original assignment again it wasn't anything special in particular in particular but my class really the big thing they did was annotating F. Scott Fitzgill's great Gatsby and just anecdotally I don't know if it's okay for me to say this but my understanding is that when they presented to Anderson Horowitz they pulled up my students work so they pulled up student work on the great Gatsby inside of rap genius as part of that presentation that was successful presentation this is one of my students is actually an internet rap genius this summer Lewis LeFaire dynamically sort of close reading this line about the sort of invisibility of labor in the great Gatsby you know using visual rhetoric links really highly informed deeply analytic we see rap genius is the ultimate close reading tool so I'm developing a whole infrastructure on the site around rap genius and education providing resources for teachers and students to come to and check out check us out and guide teachers through the process of integrating this into their curriculum and really don't have to change anything any user can add any kind of content we could go ahead and add transcripts of this morning's talks on rap genius all we would need to do is copy and paste that material from the presenters files colleague of mine put up a movie dick which was a long book is a lot of chapters but he did something really cool it's not coming up because of the server but he had students choose a chapter and basically take editorial control of a chapter and then they lectured about the chapter in their class and then recorded the lectures and put them on SoundCloud and again the embed is not coming up here because the internet but you can listen to a student lecturing on Moby Dick here one of the cool things about rap genius is that we're this really is the unwashed in a lot of senses it's inclusive of everybody as scholars not restricting that to any academic institution and inviting everybody to participate in this way and encouraging them to do so through some pretty fun features that I don't think distract from close reading and I think add to the engagement of the very same skills that everybody in the humanities and another classrooms is trying to get students involved in close reading analysis being informed visual rhetoric this is an entire poem annotated in images imagine the kids that don't speak that much in class but really have a visual imagination in their in their reading and in their analysis have an opportunity to participate in a really dynamic way one of our most visible initiatives in terms of the education outreach is a project you may have read about called science genius that involves the jizza the rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan on Chris Emden of Columbia University where students are writing rigorous raps based on their scientific learning and then we're going to publish those raps on rap genius and have scientists annotate the high school students so that's going on the New York City public schools plus one in the house my wife is a biologist I convinced her when she was lecturing at the UT Austin to put a scientific article up and have about a hundred students in an undergraduate biology course annotate this article from plus one which I'm not going to read but if you're curious on how to find it on rap genius just go to our search engine and type in gonads this is the only thing that comes up it's easy to find in that sense it's hard to remember all these different authors but this was a pretty neat thing again look at all these kids look at all these students that have participated in the annotation of this on the right sidebar there all these are students that signed up for the site as part of this class and they're not you know adding to the scholarship so much as helping each other through a difficult text reading a scientific article for the first time as an undergraduate but doing so in community doing so with other with research assistants you know with with your classmates as research assistants each looking things up and you know some in some cases really dynamically visualizing the knowledge as a sort of teaching aid so that's one of the weirdest things on rap genius the this hermaphroditic fish article and of course we're still in a kind of musical state of mind so we have everything has got lyrics at the end of it right so State of the Union 2013 lyrics but our philosophy is that all all poetry is rap all text is rap and all all all rap is text or something like that and again I'm new so there's some weird things on rap genius we've got our own visual development going on for visual annotation of images and we've got video annotation which I didn't pull up a slide for to to to demonstrate anything but rap genius is fun that's one of the things I feel like it's sort of missing from this morning I don't mean that as a criticism again I'm totally new here but the success of rap genius on some level at least for me was that I didn't know where any of these tools were that you guys were talking about before but rap genius was there and rap genius genius was fun for the kids and there's a playfulness about it and a kind of more relaxed and it's not that it's not scholarly on every page we acknowledge the top scholars of a particular of a particular text or a particular author but it's fun you can play around on rap genius there's whip poor will I am you can also find recipes on rap genius chocolate chip cookies and so let's see who's the top scholar of grandma oops it's not gonna let me but in any case that's that's what I got thank you