Articles & Chapters

How to Conduct Internet Meme Research

July 12, 2022

This How-to Guide can offer direction for those studying internet memes to better understand memetic content and the relationship between memes and power.

Studying internet memes can teach us about the values and ideologies promoted through social media content, and it can help up better understand the relationship between culture and technology. This How-to Guide can offer direction for those studying internet memes to better understand memetic content and the relationship between memes and power. It presents two qualitative methods for analyzing memes: qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis, both of which you can do on your own with a low requirement of resources. This guide explains the merits of each method and lays out ways to approach ethical issues involved in meme research.
SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online

Written by

Sulafa Zidani

As a scholar of digital culture, Sulafa Zidani writes on global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French.

Zidani is currently working on a book-length study called Global Meme Elites: How Meme Creators Navigate Transnational Politics on the Multilingual Internet. She has also published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as: Social Media + Society; Asian Communication Research; Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Communication, and others. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online.

Outside of the academy, Zidani is an accomplished public educator. As a facilitator for the Seachange Collective, she has led workshops on antiracism and social justice for organizations such as NowThis, Gimlet Media, The Onion, and The Writers Guild of America. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.