Internet Memes as Multimodal Analogies: Analogical Reasoning and Participatory History in the Subreddit r/HistoryMemes

Description

The digitalization of human communication has a major impact on how societies engage with the past. New media and communication platforms not only change how we share and consume information about the past but also how we interpret it and give it meaning. Social media enable new forms of historical representation, for example through the multimodal use of image, text, and audio, but also impose limitations and thus guide forms of historical thinking.

This seminar specifically addresses the role of internet memes as a new form of historical representation. Using innovative digital methods for image-text analysis, we will discuss how memes on the popular platform Reddit facilitate analogical reasoning and function as “multimodal historical analogies”. Drawing on D. Gentner‘s structure-mapping theory, we will analyze how meme image templates provide familiar base systems that enable complex analogies by mapping them to different historical contexts.

Period	13 Mar 2025
Held at	Vilnius University, Lithuania