If Some Institution Gave Me $100,000, Three Research Assistants, And Complete Creative Control, Here's What I Would Do

As the title suggests, this post is me sharing a dream that I have. There are likely wiser ways to allocate $100,000 and three research assistants than giving them to me, but let’s assume I have gotten what I want.

The first two research assistants

The first two research assistants I task with finding as many Wojak memes as possible. They would probably work through a variety of subreddits and then trudge across Imgur, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. 4chan would be harder to probe, because it is constantly getting deleted — so we’d have to use third-party sites like the 4plebs archive, or rely on reposts.

These two research assistants would not only screenshot and catalogue the memes on some form of durable hard copy, but they would also note a variety of paratextual facts: the URL (if available), time posted (if available) the user who posted, and the number of …