Awards

We provide a cultural heritage informatic study of ‘internet memes’: clusters of documents carrying a collective cultural meaning. The study’s focus is on how ‘memes’ are sustained in the technologically mediated memory of Google. Google, a focal web search and indexing technology online, provides a unique view into what the internet sustains for collective cultural memory. The systematic classifications of Know Your Meme’s (KYM’s) image-file classification acts as the digital reference par excellence for memetic heritage of digital culture. Using KYM’s data, Google’s computer vision data from three meme collections is collected. We use Google’s data to discuss the cultural heritage work that Google provides for the indexed world wide web through Gini coefficients and word clouds. Our networks suggest that the more reducible sense-data is to a smaller number of labels, the less the internet needs to ‘remember’ to see a ‘meme.’ However, if the labels are less strongly connected, then human inspection is required to see if Google captures memetic qualities of memes. We show that Google can interpret aspects of memetic cultural heritage. However, it fails at understanding some core cultural information about memes relative to expected cultural meanings. Computational tools like Google Cloud Vision can augment the heterogeneity of cultural heritage work. However closer inspection from experts are needed to know when computational methods are more likely to help or hinder what is sustained in cultural memory.