The Keeper Project is an ongoing research initiative focused on exploring the visual and sonic possibilities for collecting, organizing, and presenting oral testimonies of women and girls who rap, DJ, and make beats. The project was conceived by the MC, producer, and activist Akua Naru during her time as a fellow at the Hutchinson Center at Harvard University in 2018, with the goal of developing the most comprehensive database of recorded works by women and girls in Hip Hop. Following Akua’s appointment as a CSREA Fellow at Brown in 2019 and the appointment of MC and producer SAMMUS aka Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo to the music department that same year, the Keeper Project became a collaborative research effort between akua, Enongo, and renowned Hip Hop scholar Dr. Tricia Rose. In the summer of 2021, staff from the Center for Digital Scholarship also joined the project team to help direct the digital methods utilized in the project. The project scope expanded to include the collection and documentation of the creative and intellectual works, ephemera, and life histories of women and girls in hip hop across 50 years of music and culture. The research team now includes faculty members, staff, students, and fellows at Brown University affiliated with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), the Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) program, and the Music Department. As of April 2024, the project has collected demographic, geographic, and record release data on 450+ women and girls from 1973 to the present, as well as conducted interviews and created “deep dives” on a smaller number of artists.
From June 2021 to Fall 2023, the project team worked with a number of student researchers each semester who helped complete vital tasks including collecting and entering demographic and record release data for 400+ artists, contacting artists for interviews, transcribing interviews, and writing reflections on the materials they have collected.
In November 2021, after several months of collecting demographic and record release data for artists, the team recognized that we needed to begin clarifying our desires for organizing the data by paring down the amount of information we were handling. We decided to create a “snapshot” subset of ~40 artists (initially 10-15) identified by akua from which the prototype of the interface will be developed. This snapshot is comprised of artists from different hip-hop eras, soundscapes, racial and ethnic backgrounds, geographic areas, aesthetic traditions, and levels of visibility to account for the different kinds of artists we will include in the archive.
The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project (Centering our (Mother)MC’s Productions, Artistry, Stories + Sounds) is a digital humanities project that the team started in Fall 2022 to explore the visual and sonic possibilities for collecting, organizing, and presenting oral testimonies of women and girls who rap, DJ, and make beats. The primary goal in this project was to focus on an even smaller subset of artists from which to build the initial interface prototype and to explore what this could look like with the inclusion of listening/viewing materials in the form of interviews. This initiative was funded by an Interdisciplinary Seed Grant from the Pembroke Center, and resulted in interviews with two artists from a list identified by akua.
The oral histories and work included on this site now are a subset of the total project work, and more materials may be added in the future.
