An Indexed Account of Ephemeral Culture: Algorithmic Contexts of Memes

This paper takes the initial steps for trying to define metadata that may curb some issues related to digital ephemera, such as context collapse and information decay. We attempt to show aspects of cultural context as related to how memes—each of which are collections of visual artifacts that carry a cultural idea—are indexed by Google Cloud Vision (GCV). Considering three meme collections that differentiate in their visual content's expression of an “idea,” we contribute some exploratory metrics. These metrics attempt to account for locations of cultural ideas across web domains using Gini coefficients as a measure of distribution across web domains.