Building the brand new try
All of our decide to try will be based upon fifty groups of well-known memes, most of which included an introducing meme such and you can 20 some other versions (by way of example, the initial “Charlie Part My personal Thumb” films and 20 imitations/remixes for the clip). Preferably, a complete take to create comprise 1050 meme era (50 household X 21 era), however, since certain meme household did not have an initiating meme such as for example (elizabeth.grams. “Facepalm,” “Lolcats”), our finally shot contained 1013 products getting studies. Determining the most famous meme families could very well be an impossible activity due to the vibrant nature of memes and also the different ways to have researching the dominance (glance at counts, likes/votes, quantity of derivations, amount of says searching results, etc); however, we suggest here an organized procedure to identify quite popular meme families based on a mix of educational and you will online-dependent supply.
Very first, with the help of new KnowYourMeme databases (see together with Phillips, 2012 ; Shifman, 2013 an excellent, 2013 b), we developed a summary of 1168 approved meme parents. So you’re able to filter the fresh fifty most popular of those, i triangulated lists of all of the well-known memes searching within the educational records (Bauckhage, 2011 ; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007 ; Shifman, 2012 , 2013 b) with regards to the search engines dominance. and you can Bing (into legitimacy and reliability associated with the strategy look for in addition to ).
When an excellent meme had several you are able to titles, such as “Charlie Piece Me” and “Charlie Part My personal Hand – Once again!,” we searched for this new title one to produced the best amount of google search results and now have appeared in the highest quantity of instructional sources. We rated the fresh new meme family members considering the internet search engine popularity together with amount of informative supply you to definitely recognized them. Out of the fifty meme parents, 40 was basically chosen this way. Eventually, as the educational source listed merely memes until 2010, to are new memes, i added 10 even more prominent memes pursuing the an equivalent processes, however, in place of triangulating the content with educational present.
We put a combination of two popular meme-centered social network other sites (Reddit and you will Tumblr), to to obtain 20 some other instances of each of the 50 meme parents. We utilized the headings of horny Muslim Sites dating the 50 picked memes (age.grams., “Charlie Piece Me personally”) as the lookup queries on these social networking sites. In lieu of medium-particular se’s like YouTube, this method let me to pick a combination of popular films, pictures, and you can text message products of your own meme family. Those web sites and additionally allowed sorting centered on the interior ranking solutions: To have reddit, i made use of the vote rating, calculating the difference between positive (upvotes) and negative (downvotes) opinions; to own Tumblr, i accumulated the amount of “likes” and you can “reblogs” (shares) a submission gotten. After the interior ranking systems, the 20 best instances of for every meme had been sampled, generally having fun with 15 from reddit and 5 from Tumblr, since the former are discovered to be an even more legitimate and you can prolific resource. This method was chose to most readily useful mirror new cumulative view and you will liking of your users since the indicated from the active voting or revealing, looking to place the most popular which means that most associate hours of each and every meme loved ones. While the detail by detail below, so it attempt are subjected to both articles and network analyses.
Articles study
The brand new hit decide to try are studied using decimal articles data. The initial phase of programming concerned about determining the specific quiddities within the for each meme family members. For each and every meme including, the newest programmers indexed an element of the keeps that stayed on unique meme or were usually shared by the most other cases of a similar family (such, a main reputation, a certain terms, otherwise an item). An excellent rooted, qualitative data you to followed this early stage produced five kinds of quiddities, and that accounted for all the times we checked-out: target, action, particular profile, general profile (elizabeth.g. “child” or “cat”), and terminology. The complete corpus ended up being re also-assessed quantitatively, depending on the four classes: For each and every meme particularly was coded by two coders for having you to definitely or higher of your five quiddity types. At this stage, an intercoder accuracy sample try presented (find below).