Your doctoral dissertation focuses on establishing memes as primary sources to reconstruct a history of popular imagination around the 9/11 event in the United States of America. First, for those who are not very familiar with internet culture, what is a meme? And what kind of memes do you take into consideration with your work?

A meme, or more specifically the internet meme in a nutshell, is a static image or even a short-form video, with or without text; that is used for communication, or to deliver a socio-political message, and in some cases for digital social currency. The internet meme is usually humorous and references vocabularies across digital culture. I work specifically with memes about the September 11 attacks in the United States of America in 2001. My memetic database consists of both images and videos.
 

Can you tell us how your project originated and what inspired you to adopt the topic? How and why did you choose to focus on 9/11? 

The genesis of this project came during my time as a master’s student at the Institute in 2021. While on the lookout for thesis topics that would strike the right balance between academic rigor and personal interest, I knew that my primary motivations lay in exploring methodological questions. As an internet native, my tendency to doomscroll proved effective. I had been following various pages across social media platforms which posted memes on history, or about history. This, in addition to a podcast which mentioned the potential utility of memes as a pedagogical tool in history classrooms. All of this got me thinking about using the internet meme as a historical source. Upon further probing, I realised that the meme, much like a historical source, embodies intertextualities, contextual grain and a history of its own.

Memes referencing the September 11 attacks in the USA are perhaps the most numerous memes on the internet. References to the attacks exist in a myriad of forms, even outside the traditional image style meme. The vocabularies of memetic culture also borrow heavily from these references, and extrapolate them to other kinds of messages. The 9/11 meme is, therefore, almost omnipresent on the internet and influences digital culture at large.   

Since I already used 9/11 as a demonstration of my initial investigation for whether a meme is a historical source, I engaged massively with 9/11 memes and they came to be the pivot of my work. My master’s thesis worked on establishing the meme as a historical source,  therefore a doctoral project on using the meme as a source for reconstructing a history of popular imagination of 9/11 was the logical next step. 
 

How do you gather data for your research?

As someone who spends a lot of time on the internet, a large portion of my database at this point in time is memes I have found from my own scouring of the internet. I use KnowYourMeme for templates and my social media algorithm also shows me almost exclusively memetic content (given how much I speak about my research around my keen eared phone). A part of my research also involves memesourcing from the “popular”, and for this I have created an Instagram page for people to send me their 9/11 reels and a Google Form for other formats of memes. All submissions are welcome and very needed!

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), how have you seen both memes and online culture evolve over the past few years? 

AI has definitely changed the memetic landscape. Memes are increasingly influenced by the medium of artificial intelligence, in the form of “AI slop”. However, since much of this slop is still based on data scoops from previously existing memetic vocabularies on the internet, I intend to use them on the basis of how much they are shared. AI that works agentically, almost independent of human supervision in the fabric of a new kind of internet (Web 3.0) are facets I intend to investigate as future scopes for research of my kind. 

What do you hope to be the outcome of your research? 

My research, I hope, will be in service to the discipline of history. Since I consider mememakers and sharers to be historians as well, I hope my research is able to make a case in casting the net for historical source material wider.