Strengthening the fresh test
Our shot is founded on fifty families of popular memes, most of which incorporated an initiating meme such as and you can 20 more versions (including, the first “Charlie Portion My personal Fist” clips and you may 20 imitations/remixes in the clip). Essentially, a full attempt perform comprise 1050 meme era (50 group X 21 era), although not, because the some meme group didn’t have a releasing meme such as for example (e.grams. “Facepalm,” “Lolcats”), our finally attempt consisted of 1013 units to possess research. Identifying the preferred meme parents could very well be a hopeless task considering the active characteristics off memes as well as the various methods having evaluating their prominence (consider counts, likes/ballots, quantity of derivations, level of mentions browsing show, etc); not, i recommend here a structured processes to recognize well-accepted meme household centered on a mixture of educational and net-built source.
Earliest, with the aid of the fresh KnowYourMeme database (find in addition to Phillips, 2012 ; Shifman, 2013 a, 2013 b), we created a list of 1168 acknowledged meme parents. In order to filter the newest 50 hottest of those, we triangulated listing of well-known memes appearing when you look at the educational documents (Bauckhage, 2011 ; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007 ; Shifman, 2012 , 2013 b) due to their search-engines prominence. and you will Google (to the authenticity and you will reliability in the strategy pick and additionally ).
Whenever an effective meme had several you are able to titles, including “Charlie Piece Me personally” and you will “Charlie Section My Fist – Once more!,” i sought out the brand new label one to yielded the highest quantity of listings and possess appeared in the best quantity of academic provide. We rated the fresh new meme household according to its website popularity in addition to level of instructional supplies that accepted him or her. Out from the fifty meme household, 40 were selected using this method. Eventually, because the educational supplies indexed just memes up until 2010, to help you were newer memes, we extra 10 more well-known memes adopting the a comparable techniques, however, rather than triangulating the data that have informative present.
I made use of a variety of a couple of popular meme-depending social media other sites (Reddit and Tumblr), so you can locate 20 additional instances of each one of the fifty meme families. We made use of the titles of your own 50 picked memes (e.g., “Charlie Part Me”) due to the fact research concerns during these social media sites. Instead of medium-particular search-engines such as YouTube, this technique let me to identify a IOS dating service mixture of common clips, images, and you will text message systems of one’s meme family members. The internet sites in addition to enabled sorting according to the inner ranks systems: To possess reddit, i utilized the choose get, calculating the essential difference between positive (upvotes) and you will negative (downvotes) opinions; to possess Tumblr, we gathered how many “likes” and you can “reblogs” (shares) a distribution received. Following the inner ranks systems, new 20 most widely used instances of for each and every meme was tested, generally speaking using 15 out of reddit and 5 of Tumblr, since former try discovered to be a more reliable and you may prolific supply. This procedure try chosen to best mirror the fresh collective view and you may liking of profiles due to the fact expressed by energetic voting or revealing, planning to select the most accepted and therefore really associate period of every meme friends. Due to the fact detail by detail lower than, this decide to try is actually confronted with one another blogs and you can network analyses.
Posts analysis
The new attained test was examined having fun with quantitative content studies. The initial stage out-of programming concerned about determining the particular quiddities in the for each meme members of the family. For every single meme such as for instance, the brand new coders indexed part of the features one stayed regarding the brand new meme or were normally mutual by other instances of the same household members (for example, a main reputation, a specific statement, otherwise an item). A good grounded, qualitative study one to used this initial phase yielded four kinds of quiddities, which taken into account most of the times we looked at: object, action, specific reputation, generic character (age.grams. “child” otherwise “cat”), and you may statement. The complete corpus was then re-examined quantitatively, with respect to the five categories: For every meme eg is actually coded of the a couple of coders for having one to or even more of five quiddity designs. At this point, an enthusiastic intercoder precision decide to try is conducted (select lower than).