https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273889169_Families_and_Networks_of_Internet_Memes_The_Relationship_Between_Cohesiveness_Uniqueness_and_Quiddity_Concreteness
The most fundamental paper so far - attempts to define meme families, measure their uniqueness, cohesiveness, and how elements both unique to the family and shared among several meme families affect everything.
Incredibly thorough coding of everything in each meme - unique attributes of memes (quiddities), shared attributes, concreteness of attributes, participant demographics, ...
Creating a graph out of memes where the weight of each edge depends on the number of shared attributes between two memes.
Meme families turn out to cluster together in such a graph - obvious but it's nice when we have hard data to support our intuition.
Sample 20 memes from each of the top 50 most popular meme families. Code each meme according to 48 variables (e.g., variables containing the text phrase of the meme, visual characters, or Shifman classification criteria). Create a graph where undirected weighted edges depend on the number of shared variables. Perform comprehensive network analysis including measures of centrality and cluster separation between meme families and the rest of the graph…
a lot of specific and interesting results, e.g., most meme families are bound by action (42%) or phrase (38%), meme families share significantly fewer attributes (2.4) than memes of the same family (3.5), …
We define internet memes as groups of digital textual units created and distributed by many participants, which are bound together by two forces: (a) a shared quiddity which is specific to each family, constituting its singular essence; and (b) more general qualities of form, content, and stance that draw on the conventions of the “meme culture.”
Quiddities are recurring features that are unique to each meme family and constitute its singular essence. ALS “Ice Bucket Challenge” meme incorporates the basic quiddities of an ice bucket being poured on a person’s head and naming three other people to be challenged.
we have conceptualized internet memes as families of texts that share a similar quiddity.Yet each meme family also shares content and form characteristics with other meme families. Together they are organized into larger networks, shaping the digital culture at large.
By definition, each meme family shares one or several quiddities in common. Its generic attributes, however, are negotiated in the family level, between the individual instance level and the entire memetic network level. Uniqueness and cohesiveness are both expressed within the family, yet relate to different levels: Cohesiveness refers to the local bonds among instances of the same meme family; uniqueness, on the other hand, refers to the proximity of a meme family to the entire memetic network.