ABSTRACT
Internet memes are worth examining in Digital Humanities (DH) as iconic texts mashed-up with tertiary commentary. Memes, in other words, are illustrations of the swarm archive. Considering the amplifying power of the swarm archive allows DH scholars to expand their scope of interpretation beyond the text and its scholarly commentary—or the “allographic paratexts” that can raise the status of a text—to taking seriously the vernacular appropriations and transformations of the text. The swarm archive, at least in the case of memes from The Simpsons, is a repertory of layered texts, made more robust over time through its many different versions and (re)iterations. Simpsons memes have infiltrated the genre of image macros especially as responses in online message boards. The similarities between DH and remix studies become even more apparent when rhetoric enters into the discussion.
