{"id":83,"date":"2023-01-09T11:13:44","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T16:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/xlab\/?p=83"},"modified":"2023-01-09T11:13:44","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T16:13:44","slug":"excavating-memes-and-the-bone-trade-on-instagram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/xlab\/2023\/excavating-memes-and-the-bone-trade-on-instagram\/","title":{"rendered":"Excavating Memes and the Bone Trade on Instagram"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cassandra McKenney is an MA student in the Department of History<\/em><\/p>\n

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‘Hobbit Applause’ meme sourced from Know Your Memes<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Part of Xlab\u2019s work is concerned with how people engage with cultural heritage artifacts and ideas in digital environments. This led us to a collaborative study of memes related to human remains trading, or the \u201cBone Trade<\/a>\u201d on Instagram, including the accounts who create and post them and the role they play in the formation of digital cultures and personas.<\/p>\n

The first step of our research was to gather memes. We did this by creating a new Instagram account, exploring relevant tags such as #humanbones and #oddities, and selecting 114 relevant and unique memes created between 2016 and 2022. We then examined them to identify patterns in exposed beliefs, traced distribution trends and networks, and highlighted the narratives created when the memes are understood as in conversation with one another. Much of this categorization relied on \u201cexcavating\u201d individual memes into form, content, and structure, and then determining both what informed these individual components and how their use creates dialogue with other memes.<\/p>\n

Using this approach we catalogued the memes into eight thematic categories:<\/p>\n