Amanda Brennan

Last updated
Amanda Brennan
NationalityAmerican
Education Rutgers University (BA)
Drew University (MLIS)
Occupation(s)librarian, blogger, writer

Amanda Brennan is the former Head of Editorial at Tumblr and is known as the "meme librarian." At Tumblr, she sorted through site's content and cataloged trends. [1] She began her career at Know Your Meme where she gained her nickname. Due to her history of cataloging trends, she has also been called "The Librarian for the Internet." [2] She is frequently quoted in the press because of her expertise on internet memes and statistics about internet memes. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Contents

Education and early life

Brennan attended Drew University, graduating in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a minor in Linguistics. In 2011 she earned her Master of Library and Information Science degree from Rutgers University. [8]

Meme librarianship

In a 2014 interview for the Library of Congress blog, Brennan describes the importance of cataloging memes, saying "Recording these smaller moments are like recording local history, tiny bits that make up a whole that would have been incomplete in the future. They’re also representative of how current culture reacts to life, which will be important to understand how this era thought about the world." [9] She continued those thoughts in 2015, remarking to the Washington Post that, "The importance of sitting down to find these sources gives the creator the credit he/she deserves. Sometimes it gets buried under all the we-heart-its and the rebloggys, but without sitting down and saying, “This is important,” the creator loses his content – and that's not fair." [10]

Publications

Related Research Articles

Librarians in popular culture can be found across many different mediums, including film, television, music and literature. Their portrayal is varied and can represent or subvert various stereotypes. Libraries and librarians are recurring elements in fiction.

Katherine Keith "Kate" Hanley is an American Democratic politician in Virginia. She currently serves as Secretary of the Fairfax County Electoral Board. She previously served as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2006 to 2010, Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors from 1995 to 2003, as a County Supervisor for the Providence District from 1986 to 1995, and on the Fairfax County School Board.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Gould</span> American author

Emily Gould is an American author, novelist and blogger who worked as an editor at Gawker. She has written several short stories and novels and is the co-owner, with fellow writer Ruth Curry, of the independent e-bookstore Emily Books.

A copypasta is a block of text copied and pasted to the internet and social media. Copypasta containing controversial ideas or lengthy rants are often posted for humorous purposes, to provoke reactions from those unaware that the posted text is a meme.

<i>Know Your Meme</i> Website and video series documenting Internet memes and online phenomena

Know Your Meme (KYM) is a website and video series which uses wiki software to document various Internet memes and other online phenomena, such as viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, Internet celebrities and more. It also investigates new and changing memes through research, as it commercializes on the culture. Originally produced by Rocketboom, the website was acquired in March 2011 by Cheezburger Network, which, in 2016, was acquired by Literally Media. Know Your Meme includes sections for confirmed, submitted, deadpooled, researching, and popular memes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Pallante</span> 12th United States Register of Copyrights and attorney

Maria A. Pallante is the president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers, a publishing industry trade association. Pallante is an American attorney who previously served as the 12th United States Register of Copyrights. She was appointed Acting Register effective January 1, 2011, succeeding Marybeth Peters, who retired effective December 31, 2010. On June 1, 2011, she was appointed to the position which was intended to be permanent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eastern High School (Washington, D.C.)</span> Public high school in Washington, D.C., United States

Eastern High School is a public high school in Washington, D.C. As of the 2021–2022 school year, it educates 735 students in grades 9 through 12. The school is located in the Kingman Park neighborhood, at the intersection of 17th Street and East Capital Street Northeast. Eastern was a part of the District of Columbia Public Schools restructuring project, reopening in 2011 to incoming first-year students and growing by a grade level each year. It graduated its first class in 2015. In addition, Eastern was designated an International Baccalaureate school in 2013 and awarded its first IB diploma in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">April O'Neil (actress)</span> American pornographic actress

April O'Neil is an American pornographic actress.

A national intranet is an Internet Protocol-based walled garden network maintained by a nation state as a national substitute for the global Internet, with the aim of controlling and monitoring the communications of its inhabitants, as well as restricting their access to outside media. Other names have been used, such as the use of the term halal internet in Islamic countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doge (meme)</span> Internet meme

Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English. The meme most frequently uses an image of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, though versions with other Shiba Inu's are also popular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pepe the Frog</span> Cartoon character and Internet meme

Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr. Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, "rare Pepes" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.

Catherine "Cat" Frazier is an American graphic designer and blogger. She currently works as a designer for California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company, but she is best known for AnimatedText, a blog where she posts original animated text GIFs made on request. She currently lives in Oakland, California. Her inspirations include Jeremy Bailey, Paula Sher, and Dominica Falla. She is black and openly queer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media in the 2016 United States presidential election</span> Overview of social media usage in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Social media played an important role in shaping the course of events leading up to, during, and after the 2016 United States presidential election. It enabled people to have a greater interaction with the political climate, controversies, and news surrounding the candidates. Unlike traditional news platforms, such as newspapers, radio, and magazines, social media gave people the ability to comment below a candidate's advertisement, news surrounding the candidates, or articles regarding the policy of the candidates. It also allowed people to formulate their own opinions on public forums and sites and allowed for greater interaction among voters. The accessibility of information online enabled more voters to educate themselves on candidates' positions on issues, which in turn enabled them to form unique opinions on candidates and vote on those opinions, ultimately impacting the election's outcome.

WeRateDogs is a Twitter account that rates people's dogs with a humorous comment about the dog. The account was started in 2015 by college student Matt Nelson, and has received international media attention both for its popularity and for the attention drawn to social media copyright law when it was suspended by Twitter based on false Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandra Petri</span> American humorist

Alexandra Attkisson Petri is an American humorist and newspaper columnist. In 2010, she became the youngest person to have a column in The Washington Post. Petri runs the ComPost blog on the paper's website, on which she formerly worked with Dana Milbank. In 2017, a piece of satire she wrote about president Donald Trump was miscategorized as news and included in one of the White House's daily press briefings. She was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">End of Term Web Archive</span>

The End of Term Web Archive preserves U.S. federal government websites during administration changes.

iFunny is a humor-based website and mobile application developed by Cyprus-based FunCorp, an entertainment technology company, that consists of memes in the form of images, videos, and animated GIFs submitted by its users. The mobile version of the site once featured a built-in meme creator tool. The app describes itself as a "community for meme lovers and viral memes around the internet."

An Internet aesthetic, also simply referred to as an aesthetic, is a visual art style, sometimes accompanied by a fashion style, subculture, or music genre, that usually originates from the Internet or is popularized thereon. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, online aesthetics gained increasing popularity, specifically on social media platforms such as Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok. The term aesthetic has been described as being "totally divorced from its academic origins", and commonly used as an adjective.

Julia Carrie Wong is a journalist primarily reporting on labor, tech and extremism, currently for The Guardian. Her reporting on Facebook and its involvement in disinformation and misinformation campaigns that artificially promoted candidates in Azerbaijan and Honduras has raised awareness of Facebook's content management controversies, as has her reporting on the company's similar failure to act on white supremacist groups on Facebook.

References

  1. Carpenter, Julia. "Meme librarian is a real job — and it's the best one on the Internet". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 29, 2016.
  2. "Tumblr's 'meme librarian' tracks our online obsessions | Toronto Star". thestar.com. 10 January 2016. Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  3. Carpenter, Julia (2015-12-19). "2015's best Tumblr memes were all about playing with language". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  4. Masuma Ahuja (11 December 2015). "The Dress: Blue & Black? White & Gold? Cease & Desist?". CNN. Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  5. Ohlheiser, Abby (2015-12-15). "'Star Wars' fans are very, very afraid of spoiler trolls right now". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  6. "Tumblr's 'Meme Librarian' has the best job on the internet" . The Independent. 2015-12-22. Archived from the original on 2015-12-24. Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  7. McCracken, Allison (2020). "Going Down the Rabbit Hole: An Interview with Amanda Brennan, Head of Content Insights and Social, Tumblr". a tumblr book: platform and cultures. University of Michigan Press. pp. 37–47. doi:10.3998/mpub.11537055. ISBN   978-0-472-05456-5. S2CID   213691692.
  8. "amanda brennan, meme librarian" . Retrieved 29 October 2016.
  9. Owens, Trevor; Fernandez, Julia (14 July 2014). "LOLCats and Libraries: A Conversation with Internet Librarian Amanda Brennan". The Signal. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
  10. Carpenter, Julia (2015-12-21). "Meme librarian is a real job — and it's the best one on the Internet". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2016-11-02.
  11. Pagowsky, Nicole; Rigby, Miriam E., eds. (2014). The librarian stereotype: Deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work. ACRL. ISBN   978-0838987049.
  12. Brennan, Amanda. "Everyday I'm Tumblin': Strengthening Your Library's Community Through Tumblr". Prezi. Retrieved 29 October 2016.