Building the newest test

Our test is dependant on fifty families of prominent memes, most of which provided an initiating meme such as for example and 20 more items (such as, the first “Charlie Part My personal Finger” video and 20 imitations/remixes of the video). Ideally, a full attempt create happened to be 1050 meme occasions (50 family members X 21 era), but not, while the particular meme parents didn’t have an initiating meme including (elizabeth.g. “Facepalm,” “Lolcats”), all of our finally shot contained 1013 units to own research. Distinguishing the most used meme group is probably an impossible task due to the dynamic character away from memes as well as the various methods to own contrasting the popularity (have a look at counts, likes/ballots, number of derivations, number of says in search results, and stuff like that); yet not, we highly recommend here a structured process to recognize very popular meme household centered on a mixture of instructional and you may websites-established supplies.

First, by using the fresh KnowYourMeme databases (see also Phillips, 2012 ; Shifman, 2013 a great, 2013 b), we constructed a list of 1168 approved meme family. So you’re able to filter the fifty most widely used of them, i triangulated listings of all popular memes searching within the educational paperwork (Bauckhage, 2011 ; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007 ; Shifman, 2012 , 2013 b) with regards to search engines like google dominance. and Yahoo (to your authenticity and precision with the means select as well as ).

Whenever an excellent meme got multiple possible titles, for example “Charlie Portion Me personally” and “Charlie Section My personal Hand – Once again!,” i sought after the new term you to produced the highest number of search results and then have appeared in the greatest level of academic sources. I ranked the brand new meme household based on the website popularity additionally the level of academic supplies one to approved her or him. Out of the fifty meme family, forty was indeed selected as a result. In the long run, given that informative sources noted merely memes until 2010, to were newer memes, we extra 10 even more preferred memes following the same techniques, but without triangulating the data having academic present.

We put a variety of a few preferred meme-established social media websites (Reddit and you will Tumblr), in order to to locate 20 some other cases of each of the 50 meme household. We made use of the headings of one’s fifty chosen memes (e.grams., “Charlie Bit Myself”) since search queries throughout these social media sites. In the place of average-certain google such YouTube, this technique permitted me to select a mixture of prominent video clips, photo, and you will text message sizes of the meme parents. Those web sites also enabled sorting centered on their inner ranks possibilities: To have reddit, we used the choose rating, figuring the essential difference between positive (upvotes) and you will bad (downvotes) opinions; to have Tumblr, we compiled just how many “likes” and you will “reblogs” (shares) a distribution received. Following inner ranks systems, the new 20 top instances of for each meme were tested, normally having fun with 15 regarding reddit and you will 5 from Tumblr, due to the fact previous are discovered to be a far more reputable and you may respected origin. This process is chosen in order to better mirror the latest collective advice and liking of profiles as the conveyed by the accesso sito single qualità incontri gluten free effective voting or discussing, aiming to detect the most preferred which means extremely representative occasions each and every meme household members. Due to the fact intricate lower than, this sample was confronted with each other articles and you will network analyses.

Posts research

New achieved take to is actually analyzed playing with decimal posts study. The initial phase out of programming concerned about pinpointing the specific quiddities when you look at the for each meme family members. For every single meme such as for example, the brand new coders noted part of the have you to definitely remained from the amazing meme or had been usually mutual because of the almost every other cases of the same family (such as for example, a central character, a certain terms, otherwise an item). A beneficial rooted, qualitative investigation one implemented it initial phase yielded five types of quiddities, which accounted for all the instances i tested: target, action, specific reputation, simple character (e.grams. “child” or “cat”), and you may words. The entire corpus was then re also-assessed quantitatively, according to the four groups: For each and every meme eg was coded from the a few coders for having that or maybe more of your own four quiddity versions. At this time, a keen intercoder reliability take to was presented (come across less than).