MEMEography: Understanding Users Through Internet Memes

In this paper, we propose a method we call MEMEography for HCI research to understand people and their interactional contexts from the remixed internet memes they post in internet communities. While memes might not be the most obvious choice of a research subject, they allow us to investigate unfamiliar domains even when access to the field is beyond reach. We describe an initial approach of data selection, collection, prioritization and analysis. In addition, we demonstrate the kinds of insights we can gain through MEMEographies by analyzing a corpus of memes in the intensive care unit (ICU) context posted 2020 on Instagram. ICU memes open up insights into the environment, work practices, challenges, emotions and familiarized us with ICU practitioners' language, even though access to an actual ICU was completely impossible during 2020.