Strengthening the shot
Our very own decide to try is dependant on fifty categories of common memes, many of which incorporated a releasing meme instance and 20 additional sizes (including, the initial “Charlie Portion My Hand” video clips and you can 20 imitations/remixes regarding the video). Ideally, a full take to do comprise 1050 meme days (fifty family X 21 circumstances), yet not, Gamer dating just like the particular meme household didn’t have an establishing meme such as for example (age.grams. “Facepalm,” “Lolcats”), our last take to contained 1013 units getting analysis. Determining typically the most popular meme household is perhaps a hopeless activity considering the dynamic nature regarding memes and also the different methods to own researching their dominance (examine counts, likes/votes, level of derivations, level of says browsing performance, and so on); yet not, we highly recommend here an organized process to spot quite popular meme family members predicated on a combination of educational and you may net-based provide.
Very first, with the aid of the new KnowYourMeme database (pick along with Phillips, 2012 ; Shifman, 2013 a good, 2013 b), we built a list of 1168 acknowledged meme families. To help you filter out the newest 50 most popular of those, we triangulated lists of most preferred memes lookin in academic paperwork (Bauckhage, 2011 ; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007 ; Shifman, 2012 , 2013 b) making use of their se’s dominance. and you can Yahoo (on legitimacy and you will accuracy regarding the strategy get a hold of also ).
When an effective meme had multiple you are able to headings, such as for example “Charlie Bit Me” and you may “Charlie Portion My Fist – Once again!,” i sought after the latest name one to produced the highest amount of search engine results as well as have appeared in the greatest amount of informative provide. I ranked brand new meme family members predicated on their s.e. dominance and number of informative supplies one accepted him or her. Out from the 50 meme parents, 40 was in fact chosen as a result. Eventually, while the instructional present listed merely memes until 2010, so you can become newer memes, we additional 10 more preferred memes pursuing the an equivalent processes, but instead of triangulating the information with instructional supply.
We used a combination of several popular meme-established social media websites (Reddit and you will Tumblr), in order to to get 20 different instances of each of the fifty meme family members. We used the titles of one’s fifty selected memes (e.g., “Charlie Section Me”) as the research question within these social media sites. In lieu of average-certain search engines like google such YouTube, this process enabled me to choose a variety of prominent clips, pictures, and text types of your own meme family members. Those sites including enabled sorting predicated on their interior ranks assistance: For reddit, we utilized the vote get, figuring the essential difference between confident (upvotes) and you will bad (downvotes) opinions; to own Tumblr, i accumulated what number of “likes” and you may “reblogs” (shares) a distribution gotten. Pursuing the inner ranking assistance, the newest 20 most well known instances of for every meme were sampled, normally having fun with fifteen off reddit and you can 5 out of Tumblr, while the former was found to be a very legitimate and you will respected provider. This method try chosen in order to better mirror the brand new collective viewpoint and liking of your own profiles just like the expressed by active voting otherwise sharing, aiming to choose the most accepted and thus really member times of each and every meme family unit members. Once the outlined lower than, that it sample was confronted with one another articles and you may network analyses.
Content analysis
The brand new achieved decide to try was analyzed playing with quantitative stuff analysis. The first stage from programming worried about pinpointing the specific quiddities inside per meme family members. For each and every meme particularly, the latest coders noted the main has you to remained regarding unique meme or was basically normally common from the almost every other instances of the same household members (eg, a central profile, a particular phrase, or an item). An effective grounded, qualitative data one then followed that it early stage produced five types of quiddities, which taken into account all instances we checked out: object, step, particular reputation, universal reputation (age.g. “child” otherwise “cat”), and keywords. The entire corpus was then lso are-analyzed quantitatively, with regards to the four groups: For every meme like is coded of the a few coders in order to have one or even more of your four quiddity models. At this point, an enthusiastic intercoder accuracy try is actually held (find below).