"Is this anything?"

For researchers, analysts, investors, thinkers and entrepreneurs asking this deceptively simple-sounding question of potentially important innovations, MemeStat provides collaborative content analysis useful for exploring and anticipating the emergence of ...

new markets based on new types of products or services (think "tablets"),
new organizational forms, practices and strategies (think "outsourcing"),
new standards or criteria for judging the quality of organizations (think "green"),
new political issues and the social movements they can spawn (think "responsible debt"),
new fields, disciplines, and interdisciplinary areas of academic study (think "nanotech"), and
new genres, styles and formats in music, film, gaming and the arts in general (think "MUDs").

The new and unfamiliar becomes increasingly real to people as key influencers converge in their opinions on whether innovations are destined to be (or already are) new social realities. Understanding when that's happening requires social and semantic network data that looks beyond mere averages on the like-dislike and agree-disagree questions common to opinion polls because those central tendencies miss the patterns of association that cascade into consensus.

Click the items below for more about MemeStat's uses, how to use it, and the technologies it builds on.
Or for acces to MemeStat, click "Request an Account."

MemeStat is for studying changes in meaning

But why study changing meaning? Observing changes in the meaning of a meme from text supports inferences about changes in related attitudes or behaviors. Of course, understanding social change as it is happening is never as clear as with the benefit of hindsight's perspective, but the ability to see changing meaning in current and very recent public discourse provides at least some help for the job of understanding or even trying to anticipate important social changes such as the following:

Innovations that create products categories that become new markets
Business strategies and related capabilities that transform industries
Creative work that alters the landscape of literary or artistic genres
Scientific breakthroughs seen as establishing new fields
New ideas that anchor influential social movements or political issues
Beliefs that inspire and mobilize people to do great good, or grave ill

MemeStat's Main Functions are that it enables you to:

Mine your collection of news stories or blog posts (a "corpus") to produce dynamic semantic networks
Analyze networks for mathematical properties relevant to idea currency (see Kennedy, Lo and Lounsbury 2010)
Visualize networks to see relationships and how they change over time
Browse semantic networks to get to stories by clicking on visualizations or summary charts
Export longitudinal data sets for custom statistical analyses

How MemeStat works

To use MemeStat, you need ...

A corpus of news stories, press releases or blog posts from any combination of Lexis/Nexis downloads (html format), Factiva downloads (xml format), or URLs for blogs with RSS feeds.
An ontology that relates terms for the idea you are studying to those potentially relevant to its meaning—attributes, instances, synonyms, etc.
Your team! MemeStat allows you to build and join multiple overlapping teams to share work and results like a social media site for research.

What it does. MemeStat can analyze your corpus for two kinds of data about patterns of word usage over time.

a hit-count: every mention of every term in a list of terms you want to track; presented in either a table or histogram format
an association: every co-mention of every possible pair of terms from two lists of terms you want to associate;
presented in a table, histogram or graph visualization format.

What you'll see and get. MemeStat allows you to explore a hit-count or association at three levels:

A View (a table, histogram or network) of results by period (move forward and back) in which clicking on elements populates ...
A list of Stories associated with the selected View item(s) in which clicking on stories populates...
A Text viewer with the selected story with mentions or co-mentions highlighted.

Technologies that MemeStat Builds On

The heart of MemeStat is an association engine, a search utility designed to d o multiple searches that show either how mentions of a set of words change over time (think of it as 'count this'), or how co-mentions of two sets of words change over time (think of it as 'associate this and that'). The association behind MemeStat is called AE.

Ideas

From AI, the use of semantic networks (graphs) to model meaning
From sociology, the idea that structure reflects meaning, and vice versa

Open Source Libraries used

Lucene is used to build AE, MemeStat's association engine
MySQL is used to store and retrieve all data
Protovis is used for visualization of graph data. (We will soon switch to its successor D3 or Gephi.)
UCI's JUNG framework is used for social network analysis

Request an Account...

MemeStat is in private beta testing, so availability is currently limited. If you have a project or question that requires understanding the changing meaning of an important meme, please request an account as this is exactly the kind of request we are likely to approve.

To request an account, please fill out the form. Accounts are free for academics with modest needs, which we define as projects that involve analyzing document collections of 100K stories or less for patterns of association among one or two lists of a dozen or so elements each. For non-academics and / or larger jobs, contact us separately about what we can do for you.