Meme Scraper: A Web Application for Internet Meme Spread Pattern Analysis

Abstract

With culturalwise, 'meme' is one of the most widespread symbols on the internet. It can be seen sometimes resembling the spread of an epidemic disease replacing this spread pattern of diseases with the popularity spread pattern of memes by sharing. This pattern can be modeled. In this research, the meme data are gathered from Reddit, one of the biggest content-sharing sites on the internet. All meme data collected are pictorial, a clear distinction from twitter's tweet which is generally used for this type of research. A modified SIR model is created with the reference to the SIR model, an epidemiological model used mainly in medical fields. The proposed model can be used to predict the future popularity and potentially applied with other spread patterns as well, not just with memes. Moreover, a web application named 'Meme Scraper' was developed for the users to analyze the spread pattern of memes.