From 348c81b918e79b992d87445101ce73a96e7f9a3d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Naitian Zhou Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:29:34 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Update README.md --- README.md | 7 +++++-- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 698390b..173ef3f 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -1,2 +1,5 @@ -# semantic-memes -Code and data for semantic memes +# Social Meme-ing: Measuring Linguistic Variation in Memes + +[Paper](/#) [Website](https://naitian.org/social-memeing) + +Much work in the space of NLP has used computational methods to explore sociolinguistic variation in text. In this paper, we argue that memes, as multimodal forms of language comprised of visual templates and text, also exhibit meaningful social variation. We construct a computational pipeline to cluster individual instances of memes into templates and semantic variables, taking advantage of their multimodal structure in doing so. We apply this method to a large collection of meme images from Reddit and make available the resulting SemanticMemes dataset of 3.8M images clustered by their semantic function. We use these clusters to analyze linguistic variation in memes, discovering not only that socially meaningful variation in meme usage exists between subreddits, but that patterns of meme innovation and acculturation within these communities align with previous findings on written language.