Table of Contents

Chart Hierarchy

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.

Classification Decisions

The primary organizing principles guiding the structure of the chart are:

  1. Making it easy to navigate, and
  2. Creating intuitive categories that are understandable to most people

These goals pose a number of challenges:

  • People have different intuitions about academic spheres that often do not align. The project seeks to be useful to students/academics looking for memes about their fields, but also to curious memers, hobbyists, and ordinary folk that may simply want to look at memes in order to satisfy their interest or to learn about a topic through osmosis. To this end, it was important to try to balance having the classifications and subdivisions reflect those recognized by academia, yet also make sense to ordinary users as well without being too arcane.
  • The name of the page or group does not always reflect the content being posted. Names can be changed whenever the admins want, and are sometimes even changed as a prank or to reflect recent group interests/inside jokes. As such, classification of the page or group is generally based on the content rather than the name. However, this doesn’t necessarily solve the problem because:
  • Many pages/groups can not be easily classified as belonging to a single topic based on their content either. A lot of pages post about a variety of topics and don’t constrain themselves to just one area of content matter within a given field. The interests of the admins or members may also shift over time. The community’s name, content, history, and other characteristics are all taken into account, but even then:
  • There are multiple ways to slice the pie. For example, it makes sense to organize history pages by time period, but it also makes sense to organize by geographic region. The chart ends up doing a bit of both when it is expedient. There is also a searchable table beneath the chart where the user can filter pages by keywords. (A future iteration of the project will probably involve a tag-based display alongside the existing ones so it’s not constrained by a disjoint grouping schema.)
  • The names become unreadable when there are too many pages packed into one circle. In order to improve visibility and evenness of distribution, it was necessary to creatively balance meaningful subdivisions with user legibility by lumping and splitting topics based on how popular a topic was, in the following manner:
    • Topics with too many items were subdivided with a greater amount of descriptive specificity
    • Topics with not enough items were lumped together into broader categories
    • A “Misc” or “General” topic was often necessary to round up the various odd items without any siblings

The project is being continuously updated. If you see any errors, miscategorizations, or simply have some alternative suggestions, please use the contact form to submit your suggestions.

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, “intellectual”, or otherwise informative
  2. The community must participate in the cultural practice of internet meme creation/sharing
  3. The community must be intentionally and not accidentally relevant
  4. The content and discussions must meet a basic level of quality and informativeness

Educational 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 some example categories that are included or 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.

Cultural Identification and Participation

In order to be considered an “educational meme page/group”, a community has to, in fact, involve memes. This means sharing memes, creating memes, remixing memes, referencing memes, and generally being a part of the meme “scene” culturally, linguistically, and socially.

Intentionality

The community in question must be self-aware and intentional about its cultural participation in meme culture and also its purpose as an academically-focused community. Usually, the most obvious signals of this are the name of the page or group and the contents of the profile/cover photos, which reference both memes and academic subject matter. 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.

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

Quality and Informativeness

Memes don’t usually come with citations.

Except for when they do.
Except for when they do.

Despite being academically-affiliated, these communities suffer from many of the same flaws inherent to any social media platform. Occasionally a troll or two will show up and post something asinine or misleading. Someone may share a fake news article. Someone may misquote, misremember, or misrepresent something. The comment sections are home to much lively discussion and debate—sometimes all-out flame-wars, and other times profoundly thoughtful and informative dialogue. Each page or group engages in its own community self-policing and the onus is on the admins to maintain educational as well as social standards.

Thankfully, many communities in the academic facebook scene are organized and run by undergraduate or graduate students actively enrolled in higher education and formally studying the field that they make memes about. However, each community is individually run and so the standards vary significantly. We have to keep in mind that these are social media shitposting pages after all, not peer reviewed journals. We have to be (somewhat) lax about the standards of quality if we want to include anything at all. The general rule of thumb used for inclusion into the dataset is that at least 50% of a community’s content and activity has to be educationally-related.

As previously stated, if you notice a page or group that does not belong, please use the contact form to submit your corrections.

Platform and Language

So far, the dataset only consists of Facebook pages and groups, in the English language. There are similar networks of educational meme communities on other platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. I hope to eventually include them in the dataset, but that will have to be saved for a future iteration of the project.