*** EDIT: new version of the viz here!

Strong storytelling, quirky dataviz and quoting Hamilton are 3 of my favourite hobbies. I mixed the 3 and shared a tribute to my favourite musical in the form of a visualisation project celebrating its clever catchy phrases aka motifs.

>> Click here to explore themes & motifs in Hamilton <<<

So how did I do it? Let me drop some knowledge!

1. Get the lyrics

I scrapped (extracted) the lyrics and singers from Genius.com with the tool Webscraper.io and reworked the export to clean it with OpenRefine.

2. Find the themes

I started looking at text analysis tools such as Voyant tools and then realised there was no need: everything clever about Hamilton’s lyrics and motifs has already been written. I focused on a qualitative analysis.

3. They deserve credit for all the credit they gave me

• Shirley Wu’s Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton made me want to explore the topic in depth. It’s so beautiful and her idea of grouping the lines by a consecutive set of lines by a singer saved me of a lot of headaches.
• Johnathon Rose-Lyon‘s Hamilton and Motifs: Creating Emotional Paradoxes
• video explains all you need to know about motifs in a entertaining way
• Genius.com comments, especially this page dedicated to motifs

4. Hungry for more?

• Interested in musical motifs? Howard Ho’s YouTube channel’s content is top notch. I cannot believe he made something so technical so easy to digest
• Interested in poetry? The Wall Street Journal wrote an algorithm to analyse the complex rhyming lyrics.

5. I took a pen

The visualisation and navigation were all created on Tableau except the hand sketched ones. Oh, you haven’t seen them? The bunny must have hidden them…