02/01/2019 Project Update

[k-busko]

For our project, this past week has been dedicated towards refining and finalizing our research topic by way of putting into the following research question: "In regards to the variations between generational groups and their use of memes in online language, which factors are not present in each group that define the style in which they utilize this "language?" We will begin by identifying linguistic choices and features shared by and exclusive to Baby Boomer, Millennial, and Generation Z groups.

[djbpitt]

Good work identifying the groups you wish to compare, and beginning to think about the features you want to examine for those groups!

You may also want to set one (or more) of your group to work immediately on formulating a strategy for preparing a corpus. You may not be able to finalize those plans until you’ve made some progress on identifying the features that interest you, but assembling, cleaning, and preparing a corpus can take as much time as all of the rest of the development combined, so you’ll need to begin collecting your resources this coming week.

[loreese]

Analyzing this content through a generational lens is a fantastic approach that I think would be rich in variations from group to group. I think we forget how emersed we are in "meme culture" as a culture, so to break down some of the ways this language is uniquely utilized between groups sounds both fun and fascinating.

[sjw82]

This sounds like such a cool project! I agree with the professor about starting on creating a body of memes early. What is the definition of meme you'll be using? In your opinion does the definition change between different generations or between genres? What are your parameters going to be to define content?

[MLuckman]

Do you plan on working with contemporary memes and finding what factors are similar/different among and between generations? If so, are you concerned about the age affect outweighing the cohort effect? Eg, does this thirty-year-old make a meme this way because he is a millennial, or because he is thirty? Do Gen-Z 13 year-olds make memes like millennials did when they were thirteen?

Finally, given the anonymity of the internet, how do you plan on differentiating between people of different generations? Usernames aren't usually so convenient as to give out their generation - do you aim to stick to sites like Facebook, where you could snoop and find their generation? (And an aside - maybe ask an instructor about the ethics of that).

[pickettj]

Aren't a lot of memes gifs these days? Will you focus entirely on the language dimension of meme culture? Or will you have a strategy for accounting for the visual side of it?

[emmamamula]

For the project do you plan to analyze posts on several social media platforms while considering that different generations tend to favor specific sites? If so, are you going to look at how users use different language depending on where they are posting? For instance, the content and style of my tweets use much more slang and colloquialisms than my posts on Facebook. I'm not sure if this would be helpful to your research question, but it could be interesting to consider how language use is also relative to the social media platform itself and not just the age demographic of the users.

Also, as another student asked, what do you consider a meme? Are the qualities that define a meme different for each site? Overall I think it could be important to consider the variability of the sites along with the users.

[MJB288]

One question I have is what will your focus of meme sources be? Are you going to try to gather as much as you can, or focus on what is/was popular and trendy? If you decide what's popular, my next question would be what would you decide is and is not popular? There are obviously extremes that are decidable, but I'm more concerned about the grey area between. Drawing that line in the sand will be important to determining your efficiency later. Finally, would you be converting the picture/gif memes to computer processable text by hand, or writing a script/bot to do so? I have seen some bots on Reddit attempt to do this, some with decent/okish accuracy, and am very curious if you plan to do the same.

Questions aside, I like your project. The very idea of creating a meme corpus sounds hilarious and amazing. Since I rarely see analysis of memes from an academic standpoint, I will be looking forward to hearing your results at the end of the semester. I wish you good luck on your endeavors to make this project succeed.