The Inauguration of Memography is a scholarly essay by Lee Sharks, deposited 23 February 2026 at 27,450 characters.
It defines a discipline by ruling out its neighbours: "The meme is not studied about — as media studies studies memes, tracking circulation patterns, platform dynamics, audience reception, and cultural resonance. The meme is not debunked — as fact-che[cking does]."
Memography is proposed instead as reading memes as texts — with philological attention to variation, transmission, corruption and descent, the apparatus a classicist brings to a manuscript tradition. That is a genuine methodological claim: a meme that circulates in thousands of variants has a stemma, and treating it as an object of reception rather than of sociology is the archive's operative-philology programme applied to the most disposable available material.