https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444814568784
(restricted access)
One of the earliest quantitative papers about memes. Influential with many citations.
It defines a meme quite narrowly - doesn't include ideas condensed into phrases like BLM, "haters gonna hate" or anything of the sort.
Furthermore, it chose to analyze not just images, but long videos which had merely 700 versions in 3 months.
Analyzes the memes in the "It Gets Better" campaign - in the original, the married gay couple told their story to convince gay high-schoolers not to kill themselves as the best was yet to come.
The paper seems strangely obsessed with subversion of everything in memes. It would be understandable if this preoccupation was confined to the video's actors' identities and ideology, but mentioning in the same breath those, and video format, tone and how polished and well-produced it is, is just bizarre.
Sampled 200 videos out of 700, manually encoded each video into 78 variables - from format to ideological positions to identities of speakers to number of likes and views. Run regression between variables
the most interesting result is that unconventional on a lot of axis videos (compared to the original) got less views and likes.
Meme - a group of items sharing common characteristic of content, form and stance which created, transformed and circulated by many
Polyvocal discourse contains multiple ideological standpoints. Can be meaured by variability of the memes