Ontologizing Academebook

This is a work in progress. Please check back for updates!

This interactive essay features live-updated charts and calculations, so the numbers are up-to-date on the current dataset unless noted!

Table of Contents

Background and Context

Introduction

After years of tirelessly reposting the same old pop-culture-based gags, Internet jokesters and meme-makers in search of novelty have turned en-masse to more esoteric topics as a way of enriching their repertoire. This has resulted in a surge of interesting meme content about history, philosophy, literature, the sciences, and many other academic subjects being created and spread across social media. Thousands of students, hobbyists, as well as serious academics congregate around these jokeposting “memepages” and their porous community structures, which function as hubs for collaboration, community education, and memetic experimentation.

Mission and Purpose

Ontologizing Academebook is a community data project to document and analyze this unique cross-section of the internet meme community and render it more accessible to both students and educators alike. The project seeks to create a public directory of educational memepages presented in an intuitive hierarchical interface to help facilitate community discovery to a broad audience, as well as shedding light on the structure of this community as a whole.

Functions and Usage

For specific questions, please see the FAQ. If your question is not on there, use the contact to submit your question.

Chart Organization

The educational meme directory consists of inscribed packed circles with the following hierarchy:

  1. Outer level: the whole dataset
  2. Secondary level: subject divisions
  3. Tertiary level: topic subdivisions
  4. Fourth level: meme pages and groups

Some of the subject (secondary) levels do not have topic (tertiary) levels and jump straight into the fourth level because there are not enough pages/groups to warrant further subdivision.

Note: The chart is presented in a hierarchical order in order to make it easy to search and navigate. Reasonable care was taken to make sure that the classifications and subdivisions make sense both to lay users and also to the divisions recognized by academics in the field. However, not all of the pages/groups can be easily classified as belonging to a single topic, as many post about a variety of subjects and don’t constrain themselves to just one area of content matter. It should also be noted that the name of the page or group (which can be changed whenver the admin wants) does not always reflect the content being posted. [give an example?] As such, classification of the page or group is generally based on the content rather than the name.

Using the Chart

Click on a circle to be zoomed in to that level. Click on the outside to zoom out. When the user clicks all the way down to the white bubbles, they can see additional information about a given community, including a link to it on Facebook, as well as a preview of the content, if available.

Data Submission

You can use the submit form to submit new (individual) page/group data.

Please use the contact form to submit corrections or inquire about bulk data submission, opportunities for collaboration, or for other questions/comments.

Overview of the Dataset

Number of Pages & Groups

The dataset consists of …counting facebook pages and groups. Here is a breakdown of the number of pages in each subject category. You can hover over a section of the pie chart to get exact numbers for that section. Also, you can click on the label text at the top to show/hide different sections.

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Pages vs Groups

Breaking down the dataset further, there are …counting pages and …counting groups. Here’s the breakdown of the ratio of pages to groups in each subject category. You can hover over a section on the bar chart to see the exact numbers for that section.

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Community Size Estimation

Without specific user data, it’s difficult to get a good estimate of the size of the community, however I will attempt to get a rough estimate for illustration purposes.

To get my estimates, I am working with a sample of pages. (note: This sample was collected on 08/03/2020 and does not represent the live stats for the communities. However it presents a snapshot of the relative sizes at the time it was collected.)

If you add all the sizes of the sample pages together you get a total community size of , or about 35 million people. However this number is not neccessarily accurate for several reasons:

  • There is at least some overlap in the user bases/participants of most of these communities. I do not have specific user data, so I am not able to estimate how large the overlap is, but, especially within networks related by subject (e.g. philosophy pages or math pages) the overlap is likely very significant, but even between different subject groups, there is still likely some overlap, albeit of a lesser degree.
  • There is a long tail of some powerful outliers—the handful of pages with millions of followers—which do not reflect the active participants that are regularly involved in the community. Of course, where we draw the line between active members and random passersby that happened to like the page is a bit subjective, because:
  • There are people who interact with pages without liking them, or who get exposed to content through friends or other pages sharing content from these pages, or are otherwise part of the weekly page reach of these communities—the broader influence of the educational meme community within the greater internet memeosphere and beyond—that wouldn’t be captured by these numbers.
  • The data is from pages, not groups. Data about group participation would probably be more reflective of regular participants, but I don’t currently have it. Check back in later and I might!

Let’s take a look at the data I do have in a bit more detail. Here is the distribution of the sizes of pages in my sample: (Note that the y-axis is in log scale, while the x-axis is linear. You can mouse over a bar to see the exact number of pages in that bin.)

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As you can see, the sample seems to be roughly following a power law distribution—there are a lot of smaller and mid-size pages, and a long tail of huge ones. This is not surprising since the barrier to entry is low, but it takes a lot of talent and dedication to grow a page to a large size, which does not have a hard limit. But what happens when we use a log scale on the x-axis?

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It appears that the graph is roughly normally distributed in the log domain—log-normal. What does this mean about the nature and organization of these communities? haha idk, what is math lol

possible ideas:

  • dunbar’s number limiting tight-knit community size
  • topics being esoteric/niche
  • subject popularity
  • number of college students in a particular major (students comprising a significant portion of the community as a whole)

Inclusion Criteria

In order to be considered an educational memepage, a community must fit a few general criteria:

  1. The subject matter must be educational, academic or informative
  2. The community must participate in the cultural practice of internet meme creation/sharing
  3. The community must be intentional regarding the above two criteria
  4. The content and discussions must meet a basic level of quality and informativeness

Subject Matter

While school or college is not necessarily the end-all of everything that’s educational, for pragmatic reasons, using “something you might learn about in school” is a decent enough rule of thumb for determining relevance. Here is a general overview of what is included and excluded in the dataset:

Included:

  • STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)
  • Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Memes about a specific profession or trade
  • Memes about the “college/school/gradschool” experience in general

Excluded:

  • specific media fandoms like LOTR, Pokemon, etc.
  • political propaganda
  • current events
  • conspiracy theories
  • pseudoscience
  • sports
  • meme groups for specific colleges/universities (e.g. Harvard memes, MIT memes, etc.)

Here are several corrolaries about how the inclusion/exclusion criteria should be understood:

  • These criteria apply to the main subject matter of the communities in question. It is common in internet discourse that sometimes people post off topic, so occasional mentions of Pokemon or current events don’t bar an otherwise educational community from inclusion, especially since these are often spaces for informal and humorous discussions.
  • Not everything fits neatly into one of the things listed. For example, “communism” is a political topic, but it’s also a historical one, so informative content related to the history of communism can still be included. This applies in general to Political Science as an academic field.

Aside from these corrolaries, there is a lot of subjectivity involved in decisions to include/exclude certain pages, and there are many edge cases, so decisions are often made on an individual basis. Besides looking at the subject matter, the in/ex-clusion decision also involves looking at a couple of other factors.

Meme Content

The Educational Memes project, as written on the tin, primarily focuses on meme communitites

Intentionality

In order to be considered an “educational meme page/group”, a community has to be deliberately so. Many things can be considered to have “educational value”, but that educational value is not always due to the intentions of the creator—sometimes it’s the ingenuity of the user in learning through others’ mistakes. Usually, the most obvious signal of intentionality is the name of the page or group—most pages allude to both their academic subject matter, as well as their participation in meme culture through their names. Here are some naming conventions that are common signifiers of belonging:

  • ________ Memes: Aristotelian Memes, Existential Memes, Nihilist Memes, etc.
  • Alliterative Alias/Autonym/Appelation Memes: Absurd Aztec Memes, Bizarre Byzantine Memes, Campestral Chinese Memes, Debonair Danish Empire Memes, Edgy Egyptian Memes, etc.
  • _______ Memes for ______ Teens: Abelian Memes For Commutative Teens, Classical Latin Memes for Conjugated Cisalpine Teens, Pseudoholomorphic memes for quasi-isometric teens, etc.
  • >implying we can discuss ______: >implying we can discuss mathematics, >implying we can discuss music, >implying we can discuss programming, etc.
  • blahblah

As mentioned earlier, the names of communities sometimes do not reflect their content. The content must be taken into consideration during the review process.

“Quality”

For specific guidance about how to use the directory for teaching or learning purposes, please see the later sections on What the Heck is Educational about Memes? or Applying these ideas to reality.

blahblahblah That being said, I do think we have to be (somewhat) lax about the standards of quality that we wish to establish in order to include anything at all. These are social media shitposting pages, after all, not peer reviewed journals. However, we still need to have some kind of standard, so blahblahlbah

something about balancing educational-ness with humor value (If something is super irrelevant, it’s not very educational, but if something is super un-funny, is it a good meme page?)

What the heck is educational about memes?

I won’t go through my entire education theory of memes in here, but I will go through the rough outline, and provide links to my other lectures and resources/infographics. I will probably write a full paper that focuses on the memes themselves later.

Public Sphere

  • reaching out to a broad audience with vast and disparate geographic distributions
  • reaching people who may not know they have an interest in the subject, or that the subject exists/what it really is in the first place (unknown unknowns)
  • Public edutainment - educating society as a whole by proliferating vocabulary and general knowledge into the public sphere using humor as a vehicle

Communities of Learning & Communities of Memeing

  • bringing together learners, hobbyists, professionals, people from different backgrounds & places
  • creating a home for very scattered interests: “I didn’t know there were so many people interested in __, and we’re all gathered in one space and we can talk to each other”
  • facilitating a culture of learning: “people around me are joking about these subjects as if it’s the most ordinary thing, and they’re having a lot of fun doing it. this is acceptable/normal and I can/should do it too.”

Social and Interpersonal Interactions

  • Members of the community educate each other through humorous engagement and play
  • non-hierarchical learning: everybody benefits from engaging with each other
  • creating online “making spaces” for people to explore, share ideas, and also as a touchstone for potential collaborative projects
  • variety and choice of modes of communication allow people to find the most suitable one for their needs and interests

Individual Learners

  • Learners get encouragement and motivation, social validation from being in a community, make new friends, and are more likely to stay on a particular learning track
  • being in an online learning-oriented community exposes people to potential resources and opportunities that they may not have otherwise found (unknown unknowns)
  • creating content for others develops a deeper understanding of the subject as well as teaching various important relevant/general skills and abilities (communication, image editing, research, writing)

Applying These Ideas to Reality

I want to preface by saying that the way to apply these ideas and resources is not to blindly go “Let’s make students use facebook memes to learn about complicated and nuanced subjects!” There are some definite wrong ways of using this, and a vast unexplored territory of possibly “right” ways. Additionally, technology in and of itself is not always “the” solution. Rather, it’s how you apply that technology. Sometimes it’s not even about the technology at all, but rather the mode of interaction or activities that it promotes, which can be faciliated through simpler and more accessible means. The most valuable characteristic of educational memes is the modes of learning and engagement that they promote, not the novelty of social media being the medium on which they stand. Please use a lot of discretion and critical thinking when engaging with educational memes.

Safety and Quality

If you are an educator seeking to use memes in your classroom or lecture, you are welcome to peruse the listings in the directory and find content that fits your needs. Here are some tips and warnings:

  • It is not advisable to have students (especially highschool or younger) directly interact with these communities as a classroom assignment for the simple reason that you do not have control over their content and moderation policies. These are spaces on the “open” internet run by random internet people—they may generally adhere to the content policies of the platforms they inhabit, but these policies may not be in alignment with the policies at your school, and the content in these communities may not always be school-appropriate.
  • Always fact-check whatever content you find before you use it in a classroom or lecture. These are not peer-reviewed journals or expert-written textbooks—these are goofy internet pictures!

Future Directions

Here is a list of future updates that are planned. As they are completed, they will be integrated in the main portion of the article.

  • image gallery
  • a tag/keyword system

References

haha i have no references because im 100% original