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Thomas Schmidt deposited Acquisition and Analysis of a Meme Corpus to Investigate Web Culture on Humanities Commons 5 years, 6 months ago
Memes are a popular part of today’s online culture reflecting current developments in pop-culture, politics or sports and are created and shared in large scale on a daily basis. We present first results of an ongoing project about the study of online-memes via computational Distant Reading methods. We focus on the meme type of image macros. Image macros memes consists of a reusable image template with a top and/or bottom text and are the most common and popular meme types. We gather a corpus for 16 of the most popular image macros memes by crawling the platform knowyourmeme.com thus creating a corpus consisting of 7840 memes incarnations and their corresponding metadata. Furthermore, we gather the text of the memes via OCR and make this corpus publicly available for the research community. We explore the application of various text mining methods like Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis to analyze the language, the topics and the moods expressed via online memes.