DOES GENDER MATTER IN MEMES? A SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF TULANE MEMES
Anne Grotjan INTRODUCTION While browsing social media, we are often exposed to memes of various sources and topics, but what do these memes say about our views on society? As a senior at Tulane, I follow many Tulane-specific meme accounts that provide commentary on Tulane happenings and groups. These memes are created by students and are posted on Instagram or tweeted to be liked and shared among our community. Often, these memes target specific groups on campus and highlight them in an unflattering way. My research focused on sentiment differences regarding gender in Tulane memes. My hypotheses were as follows: A. There is a gender disparity in sentiment in Tulane Memes. Memes about women have a more negative sentiment than memes about men or nongendered memes. B. Memes about Tulane President, Mike Fitts will have a more negative sentiment than memes about men in general. C. There is a sentiment difference of the different Tulane meme accounts. METHODS Data Preparation For my analysis, I hand-coded a data set of 452 memes from a total of 915 sampled from five 1.
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different Tulane Meme accounts on Instagram, see Table 1. Memes that where the "butt" of the joke, too visual or memes that included videos were removed from the data set. Following the data harvesting, individual memes were tagged what gender the meme was directed at (male, female, or no gender), what account the meme came from, and whether the meme was about the President of Tulane or not. Finally, the different data sets were run through R for a sentiment analysis. 1,2 The analysis looked for the recurrence of positive or negative words and gave each meme a score. The average sentiment score for the data set was -0.3739, with a slight negative sentiment. Data Analysis Meme Account Analysis Meme account sentiment differences were analyzed in SPSS using a One-way ANOVA and a Tukey Post Hoc Test. Gender Analysis Gender differences in sentiment were analyzed in SPSS using a One-way ANOVA and a Tukey Post Hoc Test. Additionally, a T-Test was conducted on the male data set to see if there was a sentiment difference in memes about Mike Fitts, Tulane's President and memes about the general male population.
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