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rmf96 / MEMECULTURE

Syntactic Structures in Memes
http://meme-syntax.obdurodon.org/
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Project Update #4: 02/22/19 #4

Open k-busko opened 5 years ago

k-busko commented 5 years ago

We have refined our thesis for a final time and intend on focusing on the frequency of syntactic elements in a set of memes. That is, we will be quantifying the high and/or low degree of elements in the syntax of memes such as subjects, verbs, and objects. We plan on creating a corpus consisting of 21 different meme templates. For each meme template, we will have 50 examples of said meme. We are limiting our sources for these memes to an online archive known as Know Your Meme. Website can be accessed through the following link [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/internet-archive(url). In order to maintain an unbiased selection, we are picking the first 50 memes of each meme template that are 1.) text oriented and 2.) appropriate for all aged users of our website. The following list consists of all the meme templates we intend on using:

While the images aid in the semantic understanding of the memes, our focus will be directed on the syntactic structure of the memes text.

djbpitt commented 5 years ago

@k-busko I think this update is a great step forward! You’ve defined your corpus, including not only a specific statement about what you’ll look at, but also a specific statement of how you’ll collect your examples.

I’d suggest doing the collection as quickly as your team is able. With 21 templates and 50 memes per template, you have 1050 meme texts, which sounds like a lot, and if it proves to be too many, you can cut back (either fewer templates or fewer examples per template). But it's about a line or two of text per meme, and there are three of you, and once you get a working rhythm going, you can probably type the text from each meme in just a minute or so (total of about 17.5 hours, or about 6 hours for each of you) The important thing at this stage is to get the corpus ready quickly, so that you can check that box and leave yourselves plenty of time to work with it.

BenBavar commented 5 years ago

I'm curious what you ultimately hope to learn or achieve by carrying out this syntactic analysis of memes. How do you think your website will be of interest and relevance to its users? And how will analyzing the syntactic elements you mention yield those interesting results?

AncientGreekGeek commented 5 years ago

I really like how you've been able to define the collection of memes that you will be analyzing! Have you decided upon using only English text memes or also including other languages such as Spanish?

MJB288 commented 5 years ago

It's nice that you are starting to get really refined in your meme selection. Out of curiosity, do you have any hypothesis for what you might find with this particular arrangement of memes? I imagine you have some interesting ideas on the subject given its nature. I wish you good luck on assembling your corpus quickly so that you have time to do other things.

spkellyo commented 5 years ago

This sounds really interesting. Getting down what you actually want to look at will help speed along your process. It's a lot of memes, but luckily there isn't a lot of text, so you will be able to analyze all of them with your parameters and come up with something really cool. Are you looking at the memes that use intentionally bad grammar and spelling like those ones "Why u no..."? That would be really interesting to see how they play in with memes that make a point using correct grammar. I am interested to see how you arrange your memes and what your site will ultimately look like. I feel like there is some Java in your future.

emmamamula commented 5 years ago

It seems like you've made solid progress on your project by selecting the memes you will use. Are you going to categorize the memes according to the year and time they were most in use? Like the Overly Attached Girlfriend and Scumbag Steve memes versus the more recent Change My Mind meme.