cat memes and what they say about human behaviour
I created a zip folder dataset based off of cat memes throughout the years. Cyclical behaviour in humans (particularly online) has always interested me because I’ve often noticed patterns in the way we communicate and the media we consume. I chose cat memes because they are such a staple in internet culture, and once I looked into it I found that cat ‘memes’ are in fact much older than I first thought- stemming all the way back to the early 1800s. My main source was ‘The History & Origin of Cat Memes: From the 18th Century to lolcats; Or, How Cats have Basically Changed the Internet and the World Furever’ by Claire Sewell and Spencer D. C. Keralis, their work was invaluable to this dataset. It’s particularly interesting to me that modern internet communities are so quick to move on from trends when in reality the newest trends are rebrands of the same jokes and decisions we made 10 or even 100 years ago.
Hypothetically, my dataset could be maintained as long as the internet exists, and grow to expand over the decades. Ideally, some sort of AI would be able to maintain it considering it’s such an expansive topic, even I couldn’t include as many pictures as I would’ve liked. If I wanted to present it to the public I might post it on some sort of public blog and maybe open it up to submissions! So that the community would be able to participate in archiving what they believe to be the most significant parts of internet history.
NOTE: The zip files had to be uploaded to OneDrive instead of here because of the limits of this website. Please view below.