Mike Creer English 6401

 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...

      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...