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Reflections

I think I learned that the process of designing a sound research study is mostly limited by your imagination. This is especially true when it comes to designing and proposing research that you won't necessarily be conducting yourself. Otherwise, you might also be constrained by budget, by IRB (usually with good reason) or by other factors. Still, it's best to look at the research gaps and what needs to be done, and just articulate a way to meaningfully contribute to that conversation. I say, the more ambitious you start, the better you still finish with when you're done--"shoot for the moon: if you miss, you're still amongst the stars." That's a part of the philosophy I learned from crafting my research design, and I hope to keep on doing it! Regarding that future as a TPCer/digital rhetorician, I think this should be far from the last study I propose, and hopefully conduct. I've learned that being imaginative while being grounded, being thorough and s...
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Revisions, future direction, and peer response

 Hi everyone! I'm excited about the direction this research is taking! When I first took on the topic of internet memes I had only a passing interest in the subject, and thought, this is something I wouldn't mind learning more about . After putting as much work into it as I have, I feel much more invested. I even feel like the research I'm proposing would make a valuable contribution to scholarship on the topic, and that if I did it properly, I would have a study (probably) worthy of publication.  When I got my edits back from my lit review, I was thoroughly impressed by the level of attention it got. Like...I've haven't seen that much red on my paper since ENGL1010. I was immediately like "OMG a blood bath! I got to see what's wrong with this!" So I went through the whole thing the same night I got it back. It turns out the edits and revisions weren't major, but it did point out to me that I need to be just a bit more thorough when I was editing m...
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On the Research Gap Regarding the Study of the Content, Dissemination, and Life Cycle of Memes

      There are numerous avenues for additional research on the topic of how the content of memes affects the how they spread, live, and die. In my lit review, I discuss one experiment by Barnes et al. (2021) in which the researchers use 129,000 memes scraped from reddit and fed into machine learning models for training so they could use it to predict what factors in the text and images of memes make them most likely to go viral. Yet, their entire sample was taken just on the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US (mid-March 2020). The research team acknowledged that the timing, extraordinariness of the moment, and short span of data collection were all limitations that potentially affect the generalizability of their results.       Another study using machine learning by Ling et al. (2021) used a much larger sample of 160 million meme images collected over a period of about 10 years, but the place they gathered their sample from deletes posts p...
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Prewriting and 10 tentative sources

The Content of Memes and the Effect of Content on Meme Dissemination   Topic: Memes and how content affects how they spread. Goal: Compare how different content profiles for memes spread   Research Questions: 1.      How does the content of a meme affect how fast a meme spreads?       Content: specifically- text, imagery, meaning, rhetorical value 2.      How does the content of a meme affect how widespread a meme becomes?   Type of research to be conducted: Empirical   Methods: Quantitative analysis using several constructed memes measuring the instances of each meme’s propagation over a set time periods.     Aspects I need to understand before getting to original research:   What is and isn’t a meme?             What is a meme? The term meme comes from Richard Dawkins in 1976. Basically, the cultural equiv...
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Topic Interests

 Hello everyone! The readings we did for the week have inspired me to consider several topics for a research proposal. One thing I'm interested in studying is the use of memes as rhetorical digital texts/compositions, perhaps along with a focus in how they are made and interpreted and by/for whom. I am also interested in researching how memes evolve. I also am interested in digital advertising as rhetoric and the environmental/network/ material/technological objects through which people interact with digital ads. How do either of these digital media enable us to interact with others or with brands or with our own technology better? How do they affect what we know, learn, think, do, and value? I'm still in the formative stages. I haven't yet given much thought to how I would structure or test a hypothesis regarding these topics, or even what my hypothesis should be. Seems like a literature review is in order before learning how I could make a contribution to the study of eit...
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