Digital Rhetorical Ecosystem Analysis: Sensemaking of Digital Memetic Discourse

This paper makes a case for integrating rhetorical studies with ecological studies to catalog, monitor, and study digital image meme data. We develop a Digital Rhetorical Ecosystem three-tiered model (DRE3) that explains how memes impact public narratives and beliefs through parsimony, polysemy, and identity construction. The DRE3 model provides a framework for designing systems for computational...