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Record W4414117700 · doi:10.1017/9781108950855

The Language of Memes

2025· book· en· W4414117700 on OpenAlexaff
Barbara Dancygier, Lieven Vandelanotte

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMisinformation and Its Impacts
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMeaning (existential)MultimodalityMemeticsField (mathematics)Meaning-makingSemantics (computer science)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Internet memes have been studied widely for their role in establishing and maintaining social relationships, and shaping public opinion, online. However, they are also a prominent and fast evolving multimodal genre, one which calls for an in-depth linguistic analysis. This book, the first of its kind, develops the analytical tools necessary to describe and understand contemporary 'image-plus-text' communication. It demonstrates how memes achieve meaning as multimodal artifacts, how they are governed by specific rules of composition and interpretation, and how such processes are driven by stance networks. It also defines a family of multimodal constructions in which images become structural components, while making language forms adjust to the emerging multimodal rules. Through analysis of several meme types, this approach defines the specificity of the memetic genre, describing established types, but also accounting for creative forms. In describing the 'grammar of memes', it provides a new model to approach multimodal genres.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.024

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.023
Scholarly communication0.0090.011
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.233 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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