Building the new sample
The sample will be based upon 50 groups of preferred memes, most of which integrated an unveiling meme such as and 20 additional systems (such as, the first “Charlie Bit My personal Hand” movies and you will 20 imitations/remixes in the clip). If at all possible, the full decide to try would had been 1050 meme hours (50 family members X 21 hours), although not, just like the certain meme household didn’t have a starting meme particularly (elizabeth.g. “Facepalm,” “Lolcats”), all of our last attempt contained 1013 products having research. Distinguishing widely known meme family members is probably a hopeless activity considering the Interracial dating review active nature regarding memes and also the different methods to own evaluating its dominance (evaluate counts, likes/votes, level of derivations, quantity of states browsing performance, and the like); but not, we suggest right here a structured processes to identify well-accepted meme group predicated on a mixture of informative and web-founded provide.
Very first, with the aid of the new KnowYourMeme database (see also Phillips, 2012 ; Shifman, 2013 a beneficial, 2013 b), we constructed a list of 1168 approved meme parents. To filter out the fresh fifty most widely used of these, i triangulated listing of all preferred memes searching from inside the educational documents (Bauckhage, 2011 ; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007 ; Shifman, 2012 , 2013 b) and their search-engines dominance. and Google (with the authenticity and you can precision of this means look for including ).
When a beneficial meme had numerous you can easily headings, for example “Charlie Bit Myself” and you may “Charlie Section My Digit – Again!,” we sought out new identity you to yielded the highest amount of search engine results and possess appeared in the highest amount of academic provide. We rated the brand new meme family members centered on its internet search engine popularity additionally the number of academic supplies one to accepted him or her. From the 50 meme parents, 40 was basically chose using this method. In the end, as academic source listed simply memes until 2010, in order to is newer memes, we additional ten a lot more prominent memes pursuing the the same processes, however, as opposed to triangulating the information that have academic offer.
We used a combination of several well-known meme-centered social network websites (Reddit and you will Tumblr), in order to to obtain 20 some other cases of each one of the fifty meme group. I used the titles of your own fifty picked memes (age.grams., “Charlie Bit Me”) since the research question throughout these social networking sites. Unlike average-specific search-engines such as YouTube, this method enabled me to choose a mix of preferred videos, pictures, and text message items of your meme families. These sites and allowed sorting according to the inner ranking solutions: To possess reddit, i made use of the choose score, calculating the essential difference between confident (upvotes) and you can bad (downvotes) opinions; having Tumblr, we accumulated what number of “likes” and you will “reblogs” (shares) a circulation acquired. After the inner ranks possibilities, the 20 most widely used instances of for every meme had been tested, typically using 15 away from reddit and you may 5 from Tumblr, once the previous is actually seen to be an even more credible and prolific supply. This procedure is picked to greatest reflect the cumulative advice and you will taste of one’s users as indicated by the productive voting or sharing, aiming to find the most popular for example very representative instances of each and every meme family relations. Given that detailed lower than, so it decide to try is actually exposed to each other articles and community analyses.
Content analysis
The fresh new hit take to are learned having fun with quantitative posts studies. The first phase out-of coding worried about pinpointing the particular quiddities when you look at the for every single meme family members. Each meme eg, the fresh new programmers detailed area of the enjoys you to definitely stayed from the modern meme otherwise was normally common of the most other instances of an identical household members (eg, a main profile, a specific terms, otherwise an item). Good rooted, qualitative research that implemented that it initial phase yielded four kinds of quiddities, and that accounted for all of the instances i looked at: target, action, specific profile, general character (e.grams. “child” or “cat”), and you may words. The entire corpus ended up being re also-examined quantitatively, depending on the five kinds: Each meme such try coded from the a few programmers in order to have you to or more of five quiddity designs. At this stage, an enthusiastic intercoder reliability attempt is actually held (come across lower than).
