The Local and the Global in Networks of Lebanese and Algerian Rappers

This article discusses border-crossing interconnections and processes of glocalization in Arab(ic) hip hop culture. It is based on an analysis of collaborative networks among Lebanese and Algerian rappers, and their Twitter networks. This approach is grounded in relational sociology, which assumes that culture is the product of interactions between individuals. Here, two interactions are modeled and analyzed as networks. At first, featurings as a form of artistic collaboration are examined. Secondly, Twitter followings, as an important form of online communication, are focused on. By analyzing network-structures like clusters and node properties like the number of connections to other nodes (degree), this article takes a quantitative viewpoint on a subject matter usually analyzed by qualitative tools. The article’s findings indicate the parallel existence of an Algerian and an Eastern Arab(ic) hip hop community excluding the Maghreb region. Both communities have social media connections to the US-American hip hop scene, while French hip hop seems to only play a bigger role in Algeria.

2 Translation (my own): 'We have transferred from rap in Arabic to Arab rap'.
3 Translation (my own): 'When I say, the identity of my rap […] that is to make a rap that doesn't resemble American rap, that doesn't resemble French rap, that doesn't resemble German rap, that doesn't resemble Moroccan rap and that doesn't resemble rap of the Mašriq or Lebanese rap. It's to make a rap that's our own. With our own slang, with our own way of making music, of creating it.
That's right, to build a musical identity. It's trying to make an Algerian rap'. 4 I've chosen to write 'Arab(ic)' instead of 'Arab' or 'Arabic' because I assume that some of the connections uniting the members of the community are based on concepts of a shared ' ethnicity', whereas others are based on an understanding of a shared language. I use 'Arab(ic)' for countries in the MENA region where Arabic is spoken. 5 Arabic is a language which is diglossic by nature: there is a functional separation of language use domains between Arabic's 'high' and 'low' varieties. The 'high' variety, (Modern) Standard Arabic is used for example for writing and education. Its 'low' varieties, the Arabic dialects are used for example in everyday situations and at home. Arabic dialects can differ to such a degree from each other that for example for many speakers of Lebanese Arabic, Algerian Arabic would not be easily understandable.

Wiedemann: The Local and the Global in Networks of Lebanese and Algerian Rappers 4
US-American or French hip hop, or do local hip hop communities function rather independently? Can we speak of what hip hop heads fans around the world call a global 'Hip Hop Nation'? The article at hand tackles these questions mentioned above on how to best understand Arab(ic) hip hop communities.
As I will be using the term 'Hip Hop Nation' both in this article and work building on it, an explanation side note is appropriaterequired. The term originated within hip hop culture itself and is now widely used in academia (See for example: Smitherman, 1997;McLaren, 1999;Higgins, 2008). One of its scholarly definitions reads is as a 'borderless composite of hip hop communities worldwide' (Alim, 2004: 387). However, relatively few researchers mention that using the word 'nation' also places the Hip Hop Nation in a longer tradition of Black (American) movementsfrom the Nation of Islam over the Five Percent Nation/Nation of Gods and Earths, to Hip Hop Nation's sibling organization, the Universal Zulu Nation (See for example: Fielder, 1999;Costello & Wallace, 1990). Just like these movements, the Hip Hop Nation can be understood as a form of Other and counter culture uniting different anchored musical identity but also helps Moroccan elites advertise an ' oriental' yet 'modern' country. Nicolas Puig (2017)  In contrast, Lebanon is home to Muslims, Christians, and those of other faiths, and has a slow political decision-making process due to the confessionalism in political structures. These features characterize the two countries as interesting case studies to investigate the spread of hip hop culture. I will briefly outline the trajectory hip hop culture took to arrive in Lebanon and Algeria. When talking about the history of Algerian hip hop, one has to start on the other side of the Mediterranean. France was one of the first countries outside the USA to which hip hop culture spread. As early as the 1980s, block parties were Wiedemann: The Local and the Global in Networks of Lebanese and Algerian Rappers 6 organized in Paris (Hammou, 2010). From France, the culture found its way to Algeria via French satellite television (Fada Vex, 2004). Thus, Algerian youth were inspired by American and French artists (Boumedini, 2007: 148), and started to rap in the early 1990s in the urban coastal centers of Algiers, Oran, Annaba, and Constantine (Miliani, 2002: 768;Virolle, 2007: 55;Boumedini & Hadria, 2009: 141). In 1992, for example, the famous Algerian rap crews Intik and MBS were founded in Algiers (Kouras, 2008: 66). Nowadays, Algerian rap is not only listened to in Algeria's big coastal cities, but also in its small villages. It criticizes local sociopolitical problems like unemployment, addiction, visa issues, and divorce (Mouffokes & Boumedini, 2017: 43-44). It differentiates itself from foreign rap by using local languages, neologisms, and code-switching (Boumedini & Hadria, 2011: 51-52

Relational Concepts of Culture and Network Theory
Relational sociology focuses on interactions between actors. Its core assumption is,  Becker (1974: 767), who sees art works ' as the product of the cooperative activity of many people'. Becker's theory of the ' art world ' (1974, 2008) emphasizes the support personnel who accompany the ' artists'. He also stresses the significance of conventions that regulate processes of cooperation. In rap music, one such convention would be that a song is typically between three and four minutes long. So, both the rapper and the producer, who makes the beat, know that their artistic output has to match this time frame which facilitates their cooperation.
These worlds, the actors in them, and the relations between them can be described as networks. Networks are models of reality in which nodes are connected by edges.
A network's meaning for its readers depends on which sort of actors and which sort of interactions are visualized in the network. In a social network, human actors are the nodes. They are connected by edges if there is a specific form of interaction between them. The representation of actors and interactions as nodes and edges leads to simplification. This is both a strength of network analysis and a potential weakness.
On the one hand, networks translate parts of complicated reality into models, which are easier to understand. On the other, the initial concentration on specific actors and specific interactions leaves information out. The latter point must always be taken into consideration when interpreting networks. I want to emphasize the potential and the limits of this theoretical approach: network analysis is a quantitative approach. For research on Arab(ic) hip hop, network analysis helps verify if assumed communities within the culture exist. It cannot however explain why these communities exist.
This should happen in follow-up research but it is not the objective of this article.
Having clarified the potential of network analysis, its core concepts and terminology will be outlined. In networks, the presence and absence of interactions leads to the formation of clusters, components, and cliques. Clusters are parts of a network, in which nodes are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes of the network. Cliques are 'strongly connected subgroups' (Diani, 2008: 346), in which, at best, all members are connected to each other (Knoke & Kuklinski, 1982: 56). A cluster that is completely disconnected from the rest of the network is called a ' component'.
In social networks, connections between clusters are important for the spread of ideas and culture. Paraphrasing Ronald S. Burt (2004: 349), culture is more homogeneous within than between network clusters. Thus, actors who are part of the same cluster are more likely to share a form of culture than actors of different clusters. Different clusters can only influence each other if they are connected through interaction, i.e. through people having ties to more than one cluster. They form 'weak ties' between different sub-networks through which information can flow (Granovetter, 1973). Otherwise, information would be stuck in one community.
People occupying such a position between different communities are called brokers.
They can initiate change by filling the 'structural hole' between different communities (Burt, 2004). They are, therefore, very important actors in a social network, even if they occupy places at the margin of a sub-network (Padgett & Ansell, 1993). Another important role in most social networks is played by hubs: these nodes have ' an anomalously high number of links' (Barabási, 2003: 70) while most other nodes have only very few links. That is due to the fact that in these networks, new nodes connect mostly to those nodes which are already well connected to others; a phenomenon which can be called 'preferential attachment' (Barabási & Albert, 1999: 1).
For a better understanding of networks in Arab(ic) rap music, it is crucial to

Networks of Collaboration
A variety of interconnections based on different sorts of interactions can be analyzed.
The most obvious form of these interactions is featuring. Reginald D. Smith (2006) wrote an earlier research paper on networks of collaboration among US American rappers from which inspired this approach.
Featuring can be seen as an 'invitation', i.e. artists are inviting other artists to create art together (Hammou, 2009: 77): in a rap song, one artist might be the lead artist who invites another artist -the featured artist -to appear on the same song. It is a meaningful form of collaboration between artists as it 'is not only a track of mutual acquaintance, but also a track of minimal mutual recognition as a practitioner of rap music' (Hammou, 2014: 107). Thus, the mere fact that one artist features another artist reveals important information regarding the artists' status.

Methodological approach
Not only is featuring a very meaningful form of artistic cooperation, it can also be analyzed in a structured way. In many cases, artistic collaboration becomes in the end a piece of art, i.e. a song or an album. As countless songs are unpublished, published online on different platforms or offline in the form of single CDs or albums, the scope of this analysis has to be reduced. In order to understand more about the links in and between Algerian and Lebanese hip hop, I considered songs that featured artists across Lebanese and Algerian hop hip cultures. I only took into account songs that were released in the form of an analogue or digital album (I did not consider digital or analogue singles). Observations during field work, which I conducted for another project (Wiedemann, 2019), and I cannot elaborate on any further here, indicate that albums are considered a work of art, marking the 'initiation' of an artist into the world of rap. In addition to that, this approach limits the overall amount of data to a manageable amount: a database containing 165 albums by Algerian artists and 53 albums by Lebanese artists (Tables 7 and 8). These rap albums and songs include metadata on the rappers who are featured.
Information on the albums of Algerian artists was taken from a collaboratively administered and actively maintained list of Algerian rap albums on genius.com The database used in this article includes the rappers' names and aliases, and their affiliations to different rap crews, as well as their countries and cities. Some songs include more than one host artist and one featured artist. In these cases, I registered a connection between all of the involved artists. Let us take as an example the song 'Re7la', which was released on the mixtape 'El 3arabi mokh'. 7 It is a song uniting three well-known artists: Egyptian host artist Deeb, based in Cairo, was noticed by an international, non-Arab, non-hip-hop audience for his musical support of the Tahrir protests in 2011. One featured artist is the Palestinian, Ramallah-based rapper Boikutt, co-founder of the crew Ramallah Underground. The other featured rapper is Edd Abbas, who lives in Beirut and Abidjan and is a member of the crew Fareeq el Atrash. All of the interconnections were entered in a csv file, which was then imported into a network visualization software. I opted for displaying all connections as undirected edges between the artists. Hereby, I did not differentiate between 'hosts' and 'guests' because the artists' roles are not always explicit in the song's metadata. Depending on the information one wants to obtain, it is important to decide how to visualize featurings; for example, through a network in which every rapper is a node and all the rappers who appear together on one track are connected by an edge. Before visualizing the data, several decisions had to be taken. 8  Table 1) or visualizing only the crew (Figure 2 and Table 2). I opted 8 The bitmaps used for illustrating networks are made from images found at the following online locations.

Individual artists vs collectives:
It is my understanding that a 'fair use' of the images is allowed due to their reduced quality and their use in a non-commercial purely academic context. All links were checked on 14 November 2016.  for visualizing the crew because it is not always clear if all of the crew members took part in producing a song. In addition to that, strong ties and mutual influence between crew members can generally be assumed. Last but not least, visualizing a crew simplifies matters. Taking each individual artist as a separate node would certainly lead to a more precise picture of the network and could also take into account that line-ups of crews change and that crews can also split up.
Discretization of continuous data: Due to technical limitations, node attributes have to be reduced to discrete values despite being of continuous nature.   In the visualization, node and label size is based on node degree, i.e. a node's total number of connections to other nodes. Nodes are colored according to assigned country. Those having a degree of less than one were filtered out; artists with no collaborations were not taken into account.

Results: Geographical concentration
Even before looking at interconnections, conclusions can be drawn from analyzing the database. It contains a total of 748 artists, of whom 404 could be placed in at least one country; many could also be placed in a city. The following table (Table 3) shows the 11 cities with the highest concentration of artists within this database. Still, one should consider that many Lebanese rappers like Touffar (Baalbek), El Rass (Tripoli) and, according to the rapper Samzz, also ' a lot of the rappers that come to Radio Beirut' (Ajaj, 2016), are originally from other Lebanese regions.
The occurrence of three particular cities in this list is surprising: Paris, Cairo, and Ramallah are geographical hubs in the network of artistic collaboration among Algerian and Lebanese rappers. It is apparent that there are at least some artistic collaborations that cross national borders. Finding Paris on this list indicates the strong influence of Algerian and Lebanese diaspora communities.

Results: Clusters
In the network of collaborations (Figures 3 and 4), several clusters can be noticed. I analyzed if these clusters overlap with regions and countries.
There is a big cluster of mostly Algerian rappers (visualized at the top). Only a few French rappers and crews like 113, Rocé, Les Saltimbanks, and Gazateam, and Algerian artists who migrated to Europe like Intik, Africa Jungle and MBS are part of this cluster.
At the bottom, we see a cluster containing many Lebanese artists but also Egyptian The main take-aways of analyzing these clusters are the following. Collaboration seems to be mostly based on shared geographic location. Algerian rappers mostly collaborate with other Algerian artists and to a lesser degree with artists based in France. Lebanese artists mostly collaborate with other artists based in Lebanon, but they sometimes include artists from other Arab countries, except the Maghreb.

Results: Hubs and brokers
The degree distribution ( Figure 5) produces a long tail with numerous artists (nodes) having only very few collaborations (edges) and a few artists (nodes) who have many collaborations (edges). Of all the 1,352 edges, 10 the 388 artists with between 1 and 10 The total number of edges is 1,352. Some pairs of nodes have multiple edges in between them, resulting in a weighted edge. If an artist collaborates once with another artist, the edge representing Especially, famous artists -all of the major hubs are well-known artists in their country -could also be more attractive partners for collaboration. Some artists have been active for a longer period of time and, therefore, have been able to collaborate with more artists than others.
Filtering out the disconnected nodes, the average number of connections of one node to others (degree) in the network is 3.038. Nine of the ten nodes with the highest degree are crews; and only one Lebanese crew is among this list of most connected artists ( Table 4).
The overall network is quite fragmented: it contains many components but also several sub-clusters that are only held together by one node. This gives many hubs a broker functionality. Another indicator for the existence of brokers at a small scale is that in 669 songs, 1,500 collaborations (2.24 collaborations per song) can be found. Hence, many songs unite more than just two artists. This speaks for the broker functionality of host artists in general. Collaborations at a song-level form small cliques, as all of this collaboration has a weight equaling one. Some artists collaborate with other artists more often than once. The edge weight corresponds to the number of collaborations.

Twitter Network
The network of artistic collaboration is one possible way to look at interconnections between rappers. Another measurable way of interaction between artists is their communication in online social media. Many hip hop artists agree on the high importance of social media: in Oran, Fada Vex says that rap is very widespread in Algeria but that it is only visible in social media and not in the open: Le rap est diffusé en Algérie. C'est une musique qui est très très écoutée.
Sur le terrain, on remarque pas ça beaucoup (Bourbia, 2016). 11 In Beirut, Mad Prophet recounts having found a producer for one of his songs in a competition organized in a Facebook group (Bourjaili, 2016

Twitter
I focused on the micro-blogging service Twitter as it provides a useful application programming interface (API), which allows for scraping data on user interaction.
The other sites have tighter API usage policies, which disproportionately complicate access to comparable data. Moreover, Twitter users generally show their profiles publicly (one can restrict the visibility of one's Twitter profile to confirmed followers only, but this feature seems to be used very rarely), which reduces research-ethical concerns with regard to the use of Twitter data. Twitter users can post 'tweets', which are up to 280 characters long (before 2017, tweets had a character limit of 140), and can include photos, an animated GIF or a short video. They can 'follow' each other through subscribing to other users' tweets, which are displayed in their newsfeeds.
However, users who are followed by other users do not have to reciprocate the following, which makes the connections between them directed links.
11 Translation (my own): 'Rap is broadcast in Algeria. It is a music that is very, very much listened to. There are a lot of rappers. But it happens mostly on social networks. In the field, you don't notice that much'.

Wiedemann: The Local and the Global in Networks of Lebanese and Algerian Rappers 20
Twitter can be accessed by web browser or mobile applications. Even if Twitter is called a social network, it is of course not an actual copy of the 'real-life' social network(s) its members live in. At best, it maps part of these 'real-life' networks.
Not every person in a 'real-life' social network uses Twitter. Research in other regional contexts has shown that Twitter users are mostly younger, wealthier, and better educated than the rest of the ' on-line population', who are in turn younger, wealthier, and better educated than the ' off-line population' (Blank, 2016). In Lebanon, the hip hop community can be placed within a middle-class cosmopolitan context (El Zein, 2016). Therefore, one can assume that the presentation of Lebanese hip hop culture on Twitter is reasonably accurate. Comparing Twitter use in Lebanon and Algeria (Table 5), one notices that Twitter is used more actively in Lebanon (relative to the total population) but has probably reached its peak, whereas in Algeria, it has steadily augmented in the last couple of years.
Before starting to interpret Twitter data, it is necessary to emphasize a couple of points. Even Twitter users who follow many other users, or who have many followers, directly interact only with few contacts regularly (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2008). This is because ' attention is the scarce resource in the age of the web' (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2008: 2) and 'the cost of declaring a new followee [sic] is very low compared to the cost of maintaining friends (i.e. exchanging directed messages with other users)' (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2008: 6). As a consequence, users with many followers do not necessarily interact with a lot of them (Cha et al., 2010: 13;Leonhardt, 2011). The number of followers is thus not a valid means to measure influence but YouTube and Soundcloud, the prime platforms through which music is disseminated.

Collecting data with twecoll and visualizing with Gephi
As the previous analysis of the network of collaboration identified Fareeq el Atrash as an important hub in the Lebanese rap scene, Edd Abbas, the crew member who has the highest number of followers (1,206) and follows the most Twitter users too (932), was taken as the base for data gathering. In Algeria, Fada Vex (174 followings) of rap crew T.O.X, the most prominent hub in the Algerian cluster, was taken as the starting point for data gathering.
I used twecoll, a command-line tool written in Python, to retrieve Twitter data.
For a detailed explanation of how to use twecoll, see Hammer (2016). The data was gathered starting 28 September 2016 at 19:25. Data retrieval was completed on 1 October 2016 at 09:00. One set of data was collected for each one of the artists. The collected data represents the accounts that the respective artist follows (in Figure 6: blue nodes) and the interconnections between these accounts (in Figure 6: red edges). Here, I have to emphasize the fact that the Twitter networks are personal to Edd Abbas and Fada Vex, i.e. one does not find any accounts in them which are not connected to these artists. These networks are thus only part of a bigger network.
They show only the second degrees of followings (the followings of Edd Abbas's/Fada Vex's followings); the two rappers themselves are not displayed.

Data visualization in Gephi
The data gathered with twecoll were saved as a gml-file and imported into Gephi.
Then, the resulting networks were laid out using again the Yifan Hu algorithm followed by Gephi's Label Adjust algorithm. The nodes' size corresponds to their degree. Nodes were manually colored and therefore had better readability: I opted for four (Fada Vex) to five (Edd Abbas) different sub-communities, based on a localglobal differentiation, a differentiation in Twitter accounts of hip hop activists (graffiti artists, breakers, journalists, and so on), and accounts of other people and institutions.
The nodes that form the core hip hop network in Edd Abbas' network (Figure 7) can be divided into three sub-groups: US-American hip hop, French hip hop, and Arab(ic) hip hop. However, I could not find any Maghrebis in this sub-group. In addition to these hip hop-related networks, I identified a cluster, which I call 'Arab(ic) Algerians -and the differentiation between nodes representing local and global ' diverse' elements was not made due to the small amount of corresponding nodes.

Algerian hip hop US hip hop French hip hop Diverse
In contrast to the network of collaborations, these networks consist of only one giant component. This fact is caused by the data collection mechanism: only those Twitter accounts that are followed by Edd Abbas (or Fada Vex) are included and these accounts apparently are all connected to at least one other account, which is followed by the artist. What is more surprising is how dense the network is. With an average

The Global Hip Hop Nation -the international world of rap
Both Twitter networks include many international rappers and hip hop activists.
The biggest sub-groups consist of US-American rappers and hip hop activists.

Conclusions and Possibilities for Future Research
All in all, quantitative (meta)data analysis, data visualization techniques, and network analysis proved to be valuable approaches to understand cultural worlds. In this particular case of Lebanese and Algerian hip hop communities, the following results can be summarized.
The size of the Lebanese hip hop community, measured by the number of artists involved in it, is smaller than the Algerian one. Geographic hubs in the Lebanese and Algerian hip hop communities are Beirut and the bigger Algerian cities but also Paris, Cairo, and Ramallah. The analysis of networks of collaboration and Twitter networks within Lebanese and Algerian hip hop communities indicates the existence of at least two sub-communities within the Arab(ic) hip hop community.
The Lebanese hip hop community is embedded in a network of collaborations, which also includes diaspora artists and artists based in other Arab(ic) countries, 12 Edges can be undirected or directed. If edges are directed, the indegree is the number of incoming edges connecting a node to others.  This article used a quantitative approach based on many binary either/or decisions -for example, each artist was placed in exactly one country. Of course, this oversimplifies reality: many artists identify as having more than one nationality and many are seen by fans as part of one or another 'national hip hop culture'.
Nevertheless, I would argue that community members' nationality is a category that helps with analyzing and understanding of Arab(ic) hip hop culture(s), even if it has to be deconstructed in the end. ?